The thing we take for granted

Reaching the end of the pavement, over at In the Pipeline::

And this was the first lecture I had ever heard where I understood nothing but the common verbs and the minor parts of speech. I listened to the whole thing with mounting alarm. It had taken me all the way to graduate school to come definitively to the limits of my knowledge, but the pavement ran out right there. I was so stunned I couldn’t even take notes—I’d never tried to take notes on something that I wasn’t comprehending at all, so I didn’t know how.