“Tsk, tsk! What have we here? A lazy pupil asleep in the first row! We can’t have that, now, can we, Professor?”
With that she kept on trying. As she labored, I couldn’t stop thinking of all kinds of unhelpful things, chief among them how the scene occurring before me would best be translated into prose, how, in order to evoke it faithfully, one could hardly avoid figurative language. What metaphor(s), I asked myself, would prove most felicitous, most apt? To avoid bathroom humor or bathos (“a descent from the lofty or exalted into the commonplace: comedown; anticlimax”), not to mention a minefield of predictable puns, the rendering of such a scene would require a stroke of genius. It would present a stiff challenge. I’d have to give it some very hard thought. Would I rise to the occasion
