1. Though mentally loaded up with remembered poetry, Montaigne preferred reading history, and especially biography, to other genres: “[Historians] are pleasant and easy; and at the same time, man in general, the knowledge of whom I seek, appears in them more alive and entire than in any other place—the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in detail, the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him.  Now those who write biographies, since they spend more time on plans than on events, more on what comes from within than on what happens without, are most suited to me. That is why in every way Plutarch is my man.” (Of Books)

2. In his short story, Tres Versiones de Judas, Jorge Luis Borges invents a Swedish theologian who publishes a heretical argument for the heroism of Judas. In the mind of Nils Runeburg, the apostle betrayed Christ not for thirty silver coins, but as an act of supreme self-sacrifice, perhaps surpassing Christ's own. Instigating the Passion through his betrayal, Judas played a key role in human redemption, while permanently condemning himself: “Renuncio al honor, al bien, a la paz, al reino de los cielos, como otros, menos heroicamente, al placer.” Runeberg’s argument is predictably rejected; he eventually goes mad, wandering the streets of Malmo, until he dies in 1912 of a ruptured aneurysm.

3. Henry James, in his collection of travel writings, Italian Hours, provides me with a new word: busky. Webster tells me the word is obsolete and replaced by bosky, meaning "1: having abundant trees or shrubs. 2: of or relating to a woods." James is writing of a visit to Genoa and the watery surrounds:

"[The] bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky gray-green hills close it in, and on either side of the entrance, perched on a bold headland, a wonderful old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard."