The questionnaire ruffled me a bit. “did your field exist in 1900?” My field? There's the rub. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” Voltaire writes in the last sentence of Candide. Not my garden: our garden. Our field, the study of literature as a heightened form of language, came into existence by 500 BC in a few languages. In the modern languages, our field arrived a little later, let's say by the fourteenth century. And today our field, with all its knolls and swales, remains one, embracing many, rewarding all.