Everywhere we look, the unexpected waits to delight, challenge or even destroy us. Even a cursory exposure to the life of letters truly helps us order our experience of the world. It is the stock and trade of education as is little else. Doctor O'Brien has been fortunate enough to have wrung some happy meaning from the most prosaic of circumstance. Alexander Pope was wrong: a little bit of learning may be a dangerous thing: but it is a beginning.