If these brief pieces were called flash essays would they seem more au courant?
For many years I have wondered how it can be that the rotation of the moon is so precisely coincidental with its revolutions that we on earth see only a single side. It seemed to me implausible that the correspondence could be so precise that there would be no change even over thousands of years. Only recently did I read the simple explanation. It seems the earth’s gravitational pull is exerted on the surface of the moon. While the moon’s lesser pull is manifested on earth in the tides, the more powerful earthly pull on the moon caused one lunar side to bulge out such that that side was permanently locked into the earth’s attraction.
I retain, though a scientific curiosity about a biological point. While I can understand the function of our human bodily hair, I do not see how the hair on the head can have evolved to grow indefinitely. Surely hair on the top of the head will become inconvenient to any individual after a short time. It is worse than a peacock’s tail. Hunter gatherers without control of fire must still cut their hair. But there is no animal (though some come close) who, without artificial breeding, has developed such troublesome hair. How can this have happened?
One might think that the idea of a philosophia perennis is a modern convenience, picking from belief patterns which were a portion of the web of culture in a given time and place only those tenets that appeal to our own age. Out of original context and juxtaposed instead to practices from far different environments, can the ideas they imply retain meaning? Does not such a selection inevitably speak more of the modern synthesizer than the ancient devotee?
On the other hand gathering the elements of faith and belief that are most widespread must infallibly indicate those which are most essential for our species. Elements that are less meaningful, more accidental fall away, revealing more clearly what is significant. I, at any rate, accept the idea of a psycho-spiritual unity of our species transcending the admittedly powerful and myriad differences that separate us and impede understanding.
In these belated days, when modern higher education has virtually vanished having given way to vocational school, and money has displaced knowledge as the goal of a university education, the etymology of the word school is worth remembering. It is derived from the Greek scholē, meaning leisure, or the activities of leisure such as learned research or disputation. Thus the disinterested and playful use of our most highly developed capabilities is removed from banal job training.
Similarly, the liberal arts are those studies that cultivate intellectual growth without regard for making a living. Their study is characteristic of free people which is to say those who are unemployed. Liberal arts are opposed to the servile or mechanical arts which may be quite necessary to one’s comfort but boring when examined for their own sake. Though the term “liberal arts” was not used until late in the Middle Ages, it indicated the verbal and philosophic skills which according to the ancient Greeks were essential not only for citizenship but, more importantly, for the fulfilment of human potential.
In this age, when technology has advanced to the point that work merely to support ourselves need take very little of anyone’s day, we fin d that many are working far longer hours than their Stone Age ancestors. Of course, most people today must perforce make a living, but that fact need not lead to the abandonment of true education and pure research, directed at no application whatever, self-justifying, the highest end of humankind. How absurd to see mortuary science and turf management as college subjects, but they are little worse than business schools and degrees in communication. When universities made a place for the so-called learned professions of law, medicine, and divinity, they little knew that these guests in the home of higher education would, like invading barbarians, seize entire institutions and take over.
I am amused as I watch words turn into their own opposites like minute Derridean yang-yin fireworks. A number of such so-called contronyms have long existed in the language: apology, bolt, cleave, dust, garnish, peer, sanguine, strike, and the like. I feel I see several others transforming before my eyes.
Everyone has heard “literally” used to mean figuratively; “cordial” to mean coldly polite, and “nonplussed” to mean indifferent or unaffected. Such objections are time-limited. One need only open Henry Watson Fowler to find his distaste for the use of “meticulous” to mean what it does to everyone today.
Many homosexuals today make a polemical point of their sexual orientation as a fundamental identity. It is important for them to assert gayness as an element of their nature. Yet it is clear from ancient Greek and Roman history and a good many Islamic courts, medieval and more recent, that a considerable number, though not all, men will engage in same-sex activities if such liaisons are approved or tolerated by society. Surely the fact must be that people – men and women – occupy a variety of places along a spectrum from very strongly heterosexual to equally strongly homosexual in preference. Given taboos and sanctions, many more mildly attracted to same-sex relationships will fail to act on such impulses, while those with more intensely defined tastes will find them impossible to resist.
Further complicating factors exist. In animals homosexual behavior is commonly observed, but may usually be regarded as a simple error, since individuals virtually never display a consistent proclivity for homosexual partners. Even this is not an absolute rule, though. Ten per cent of rams among domestic sheep refuse to mate with ewes while readily having sex with other males. Finally, it is little surprising is social and psychological factors are powerful in directing even such elemental behavior. Our genitals, of course, cannot tell what may be stimulating them. We know only in the mind.
I have read many explanations of medieval courtly love conventions. To some they imply social norms that accept adultery, while to others the poetry was always part of a sophisticated game involving strictly circumscribed ritual flirtation. To some they are a sign of the influence of Arabic poetry such as Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, to others a reflection of Catharism or Mariolatry. To some courtly love is merely an apparition which does not in fact exist. Why has nobody suggested the simplest and most likely element in what is surely a phenomenon with multiple causes: the attitude of vassalage before the feminine is nothing but an accurate representation of the male’s total subjection to sexual allure? Who among men has not felt very like the wolf in the 1940s cartoon whose jaw drops to the floor as his eyes bug out at the sight of a lovely female figure? The poems seem to me to exaggerate not one bit.
In this area the word town is used to mean a subdivision of a county, the political unit elsewhere called a township. In some instances such as where I live in Goshen the town has the same name as one of its municipalities. Thus, as one departs Goshen, a sign declares “entering town of Goshen” when in fact the driver is leaving the village of Goshen, what in common usage is called a “town,” and entering the countryside. This usage applies throughout New England.
In much of the United States townships (as they are more generally called) are a sort of phantom political division without independent governance. As a child I relished knowing that I loved in Milton Township largely because one never heard the name.
Townships under that name are thickly populated and, in popular usage, non-white in South Africa (and colonial Rhodesia), or simply thinly populated as in Scotland, Australia, and Canada,
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