John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces (Chap. 5.5) lyrics

Dr. Talc lit a Benson and Hedges, looking out of the window of his office in the Social Studies Building. Across the dark campus he saw some lights from the night cla**es in other buildings. All night he had been ransacking his desk for his notes on the British monarch of legend, notes hurriedly copied from a hundred-page survey of British history that he had once read in paperback. The lecture was to be given tomorrow, and it was now almost eight-thirty. As a lecturer Dr. Talc was renowned for the facile and sarcastic wit and easily digested generalizations that made him popular among the girl students and helped to conceal his lack of knowledge about almost everything in general and British history in particular. But even Talc realized that his reputation for sophistication and glibness would not save him in the face of his being unable to remember absolutely anything about Lear and Arthur aside from the fact that the former had some children. He put his cigarette in the ashtray and began on the bottom drawer again. In the rear of the drawer there was a stack of old papers that he had not examined very thoroughly during his first search through the desk. Placing the papers in his lap, he thumbed through them one by one and found that they were, as he had imagined, principally unreturned essays that had accumulated over a period of more than five years. As he turned over one essay, his eye fell upon a rough, yellowed sheet of Big Chief tablet paper on which was printed with a red crayon: Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the d**h penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St.bCa**ian of Imola was stabbed to d**h by his students with their styli. His d**h, a martyr's honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers. Pray to him, you deluded fool, you “anyone for tennis?” golf-playing, co*ktail-quaffing pseudo-pedant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron. Although your days are numbered, you will not die as a martyr for you further no holy cause but as the total a** which you really are ZORRO A sword was drawn on the last line of the page. “Oh, I wonder whatever happened to him,” Talc said aloud.