Great Books tend to arise in the presence of great audiences. by [[Naomi Kanakia]]

Kanakia looks at what may have made 19th C. Russian literature great. This has potential pieces to say about how other cultures had higher than usual rates of creativity in art, literature, etc.

What commonalities did these sorts of societies have? Were they all similar or were there broad ranges of multiple factors which genetically created these sorts of great outputs?

Could it have been just statistical anomaly?

I'm not sure that's the correct diagnosis.

Alternative take: you were not, at that point in your life, equipped to understand that you could be generating new ideas and that you should walk away from that writing course with an appreciation for writing as a vehicle for what you'd like to accomplish with a given subject/format. It's fine that you didn't—many people don't—and your instructors, institution, parents, community, etc. probably could have done a better job at communicating this to you, but it was there, and it was the point all along.

I think this satisfies the threshold of "minimum viable publication". So write this up and reference it here.

Full impl.:

getLineStart(tokenPosition, anteTerminators = null) {
  if (tokenPosition > this._edge && tokenPosition != this.length) {
    throw new Error("random access too far out"); // XXX
  }

  // NB: Since line terminators can be the multibyte CRLF sequence, care
  // must be taken to ensure we work for calls where `tokenPosition` is some
  // start minus 1, where that "start" is some line start itself.
  for (let i = this._lineTerminators.length - 1; i >= 0; --i) {
    let current = this._lineTerminators[i];
    if (tokenPosition >= current.position + current.content.length) {
      if (anteTerminators) {
        anteTerminators.push(...this._lineTerminators.slice(0, i));
      }
      return current.position + current.content.length;
    }
  }

  return 0;
}

(Inlined for posterity, since this comes from an uncommitted working directory.)