If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why – the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. --C. S. Lewis
I position this remark of Lewis' here to remind, or perhaps to tell, all of you that you need to be thinking of our class as an on-going conversation. What I am saying on any day has a special point, one that you can only fully appreciate by having been attentive to and actively remembering what was said on earlier days. I fear that many of you understand classes as a set of atoms, largely, maybe even wholly, self-contained. You come, you hear, you (mostly) forget. But then you end up like the person who enters the conversation at eleven o'clock when the conversation began at eight. You miss the real bearing of what is being said.
Each day of class should seem to you like the resumption of a conversation, one whose breaking-off point you remember and whose earlier stages you can bring to bear on what is currently being said.
