www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/books/george-steiner-dead.html
My experience with George Steiner’s work is bitter-sweet. His book “After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation” had great significance for me at a time when I struggled to establish my bona fides as an academic linguist while casting about for a basis on which to salvage a disintegrating career. Having striven with mixed success to acquire my extra languages, I envied his natively absorbed polyglot fluency. My fight to be learned is behind me. That makes it easier now to tip my hat to Steiner for having supported it.
Mr. Steiner complained… of having “scattered and, thus, wasted my strengths… As the close comes nearer, I know that my crowded solitude, that the absence of any school or movement originating in my work, and that the sum of its imperfections are, in considerable measure, of my own doing… It is the unwritten book which might have made the difference… Which might have allowed one to fail better. Or perhaps not.”
“I’d love to be remembered as a good teacher of reading,” he told The Paris Review in 1994. Characteristically, he had a specific, lofty notion of reading as a moral calling. It should, he added, “commit us to a vision, should engage our humanity, should make us less capable of passing by.”
(Christopher Lehman-Haupt and William Grimes, “George Steiner, Prodigious Literary Critic, Dies at 90,” NYTimes, 2-3-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
What Stuff Is About
www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/science/quadratic-equations-algebra.html
Dr. Loh’s statement teases me, a non-adept at mathematics, in imprecise ways.
The saucy segments are: “formulas without meaning”; “reason logically”; and “through.”
There are no formulas “without meaning”; a formula “means” what it formulates. It abstracts and generalizes in a repeatable way, and it’s useful only to those who have it beyond memory. It’s the act of lazy head-stuffing that’s meant to be belittled.
To reason “logically” is the same as to drink “liquidly.” How else to do either?
“Through” is tricky. At first I read it as prepositioning the notion of advancement by means of penetrative navigation. Picture, if you will, a thicket of precise statements; then picture yourself reasoning your way “through” them. On second reading, however, I estimate Dr. Loh to imply instrumentality — “by means of.” Picture yourself engaged in a reasoning process, and doing so by making a series of precise statements — reasoning “through” them.
Much stuff is about the likes of “through,” which is why computers are better at arithmetic than at translating.
(c) 2020 JMN