Straight at Ged in the small rocking boat he came, opening his long, toothed jaws as he slid down arrowy from the air: so that all Ged had to do was bind his wings and limbs stiff with one sharp spell and send him thus hurtling aside into the sea like a stone falling.

And the book is upfront about its refusal to remain just another treasury of beloved chestnuts: “Conventional essays tend to privilege expositional clarity — that arrowy delineation of thought that promises the logical development of ideas toward uncluttered and easily digestible meanings. What we don’t tend to value in essays, in other words, is what the essay actually is: an attempt, a trial, an experiment that does not guarantee a result. After all, to genuinely ‘attempt’ something, doesn’t there need to be the genuine risk that we might fail?”

Presently the ivory-skinned lady turned to him—for she knew his cloak and tunic to be her own fine work, done with her maids— and arrowy came her words upon the air: “Friend, I, for one, have certain questions for you. Who are you, and who has given you this clothing? Did you not say you wandered here by sea?”

Hour by hour she held her pace; not even a falcon wheeling downwind, swiftest bird, could stay abreast of her in that most arrowy flight through open water, with her great passenger—godlike in counsel, he that in twenty years had borne such blows in his deep heart, breaking through ranks in war and waves on the bitter sea.

He has now set up his staff in Geneva, a little London in its attractiveness to exiles; and his arrowy, flashing wit gleams no longer across the foreign world of the English metropolis.