Coming from Northern California, where my beloved Pacific Ocean is often a murky green or fathomless purple-gray, I always found the “wine-dark” seas of Homer resonant, fitting; until I remembered that Homer was writing about the sparkling blue gemstone that is the Mediterranean, set within its circlet of land. Wine-dark? Simple scansion cannot account for […]
Why the Ocean is Blue Read More »
There come times when a thing you’ve known time out of memory suddenly opens before you, blossoms into beauty where you’d never known to seek it. These are times of transfiguration, and in their witness to both the humble hiddenness of beauty and the deep meaningfulness of reality, they refresh our faith in a world
Parts of Speech: A Reconsideration in Grammar and Philosophy Read More »
Our youngest son is just now beginning to communicate vocally. His older sister is forming sentences and learning new words every day, but we are just as pleased with the occasional grunt or squeal we get out of him. On one level, we are excited because this means that he is developing normally—something we never
There Are No Words; and Yet There Are Read More »
If you want to learn a foreign language, the first thing you should do is start when you are under four years old, when everything is new and you just take it for granted that this is so. I had the great good fortune of living in a small town outside Salzburg, Austria until I
Some tips for Learning a Foreign Language Read More »
Yesterday we posted an article by one Mr. Andrew Kern in which the author attacks progressive education for the way it teaches children to read. He claims that “…when we teach reading, we treat the child like she is a mechanism learning a process. We do not teach it like she is a person interacting
Stories Are Makeshift Things Read More »
I was watching a bit of Brannagh’s Hamlet tonight and luxuriating in the language (some of which I understood) when my dear wife asked me for my opinion: “Do you think the groundlings actually understood what was going on in those plays?” I said I thought they did (but that’s probably a subject for another
Shakespeare’s Language and the Evolution of Human Intelligence Read More »
Words matter. This is the lesson of Christian classical education. This is the logos of John 1. This is where there is love. It’s why I sometimes get alarmed. Rhetoric is the art of speaking so that your listeners can hear you and find truth. In a recent Circe Blog post Eva Brann took us
