The word mystery has an unexpected beginning. The Greek verb from which it derives means to close one’s eyes, not to avoid what cannot be explained, but to still oneself to understand. The idea is not unrelated to the derivation of our word school, meaning originally leisure in Greek. As a place of learning and …
Author Archives: rultimo
A Sign of Critical Thinking
At a train station nearby, workers have extended fencing around a battery of new electrical equipment and attached a sign reading Trespassing Not Allowed. The old fencing that guards the adjacent area has its own sign, but that one reads No Trespassing. Why the change? Who could possibly know. But whatever the reason, the two …
Shakespeare’s Tragedy
We use the word tragedy commonly and rather loosely to mean a disaster of some sort, an accident that has befallen someone inexplicably, a calamity, a misfortune. The word, though, has a more precise meaning in the study of literature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the renowned British scholar A. C. Bradley gave …
Why, Wherefore Ask You This?
A gentleman named Brabantio was once a senator in the Republic of Venice. His daughter, Desdemona, was, as fate would have it, quite beautiful, and he, of course, was quite protecting of her. One young suitor by the name of Roderigo the father had already parried away, but the desperate man called yet again on …
Sailing into Unknown Waters
An instructor of mine in college once admonished his class of graduate students that they all read too much. It was spring, the term almost over, and he threw down the challenge that we all should enroll in a drawing class over the summer. His judgment surprised everyone, because both the scholarship and writing of …