# Le Ton beau de Marot *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 01 Jun 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Damien Broderick *01 Jun 1998, 17:29* In this company of lexicosophers, I think Douglas Hofstadter's recent heartbreakingly poignant, delightfully clever arts-meets-science book sub-titled `In praise of the Music of Language' (and in memory of his wife, dying of cancer as the book grew toward conception) is one to recommend. (`That same summer, like so many summers and winters before, I was longing for romance, something that seemed always to elude me; and again, inside me, some fatalistic voice said, "She'll never come along. You'll never find her. You'll never get married." And in fact, this voice was closer to being right. It took far, far longer. Although there were a few sad and near misses along the way, it took another fifteen hellish, love-bleak years before I finally found the romance I had been hoping for - but long or short, I finally did find her, I finally did marry her, we finally did establish a little loving family of four.' Reader, she died.) This might seem a long bow to draw, and heaven knows I wouldn't wish to stray from the declared theme of this list. :) So I take heart in noticing Hofstadter's introductory ackowledgement that `The spark that lit the fire that became this book was an invitation from Gene Woolf to speak in Cedar City, Utah, in the spring of 1995'. Damien ---