Sprinkled through the narrative are moments that actually happened. One, for example, was a friend's habitual, drunken recitation of the Blake poem, "Tiger, Tiger," always worth watching:
Sullivan disliked sentiment and sloppy thinking and sometimes performed a routine that demonstrated as much. With a few drinks in him, he was known to recite a portion of a poem by William Blake to much delight and hoopla from his inebriated colleagues: “Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” Sullivan would begin, his blonde hair short but long enough to comb, which really meant long enough to look uncombed because Sullivan always had the shaggy look of an absent-minded professor, and as he began the poem, his hand would sweep the hair from his forehead in a theatrical gesture, “in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Here Sullivan would look positively baffled by the question, as if it had cosmic significance. “What the hammer?” he asked next. “What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil?” – and at this precise moment Sullivan would scrunch his ruddy face into an expression of speechless horror and bewilderment, as if the questions were too great for the contemplation of mere mortals, hanging in the air like painful reminders of human ignorance and insignificance – and after holding the moment for all it was worth, and perhaps making yet another theatrical sweep of his hand to brush hair from his forehead, Sullivan would shout with an exuberance that never failed to set the first-time listener aback, “What the fuck!? WHAT THE FUCK!?”
This was how we Russian linguists amused ourselves at the height of the Cold War.
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