My reading of this book was interrupted by two conferences, a typhoon disaster, and hours of household chores. Needless to say are the moments when I had to stop after reading a few lines of Barbaza's phenomenological explication on the metaphysics of literary traditions and nation-building. These instances of pagsabat against my own hearing-speaking with the book, I recently learned, may not only be confined within the semantic field of the Tagalog sabat, that is, indicative precisely of speech, because in Bikol, where the pasture of meanings is larger, sabat is "to meet someone, to welcome, to encounter, to run or bump into someone unexpectedly, to row against
the current, to go against the grain, to stand up to or face up to someone" (Mintz & Britanico 1985,
458).