All education—whether it’s tailored for scholars, slackers, spies, or saboteurs—is really an education in the signs of belonging. We learn to wear the right clothes, say the right things, know the right codes—sometimes for a cover identity, sometimes for an identity we’re determined to make our own.

The knife is the weapon of the fugitive, the assassin, the secret courier, the turncoat—in short, the spy.

(Perhaps the enduring impulse that drives a life of scholarship is like the enduring impulse that drives a life of art: not asking a question that you don’t know the answer to, but answering a question that you never figure out how to formulate.)