I’m bouncing between two books: one is Meher McCarthur’s Confucius: Throneless King and the other Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean.

I’m barely into either of them, but so far both are focused on their figures’ obsession with honoring their ancestors and their mothers.

Both are also works by men writing about figures centuries distant from them, but that’s not really my point.

Nor is my point that the discursive novel of a nineteenth century essayist is very much like a non-fiction book by a contemporary academic.

Actually, I’m not entirely sure what my point is.