30 • Also, Leo, as I rather think I was just saying, one might learn [more] about the allegorical element – and then wish one hadn’t done so: perhaps because the allegory as such is so strained or uncongenial to one’s own world-view? (But I dare say the word ‘good’ [‘good allegory’] is there to allow one the bargain value-for-effort / ergonomically highly efficient resource of claiming that any allegory in which such considerations obtain cannot, ipso facto, be a good one.)

31 • After all, is one really to doubt that one gains more pleasure from such propositional content as a poem might contain if and to the extent that one shares the beliefs that are expressed in it? Or is there an equal (surely not greater?) pleasure in thinking something along the lines of: ‘Beautifully put – but, no: I don’t agree with that [at all]?’

32 • Much as, say, an artful, brilliantly evoked description of so-called ‘time-travel’ – literally travelling into the somehow-right-here past – might be to those who think there is in principle not even the remotest chance of such a thing being possible, never mind actual. No matter how wondrous might be the impossiblist verbal or situational effects achievable thereby, a sort of near perpetually distantly-clanging sense of ‘ Yes, but ’ will hang over the whole wondrous body even so. Every moment of the experience is horribly vulnerable to the deflating thought: ‘But this simply couldn’t happen, Jim!’

33 • Or perhaps it is as if ...