Our Latest Issue Contains Even More Hope Than Usual

“I go to seek a great perhaps,” the French humanist François Rabelais reportedly said on his deathbed in 1553. Centuries later, Larry McMurtry’s favorite uncle, Johnny, improbably used the term in an unpublished memoir he left to his nephew. Johnny imagined a good pal “catching beeves in the great perhaps.”How that expression traveled from Rabelais’s lips in Paris to Johnny’s pen in Muleshoe shall remain lost to time. That it is an obscure concept today is a tragedy.What is the great perhaps? Johnny seems to have used it to mean, more or less, the “great beyond.” And I suppose François meant it that way, considering he was in the middle of greatly beyonding when he coined the phrase. Others have used it to mean more terrestrial…

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