Areopagus Volume LIV

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the fifty fourth instalment of the Areopagus. Perhaps you feel, as many do, that July has come around too soon. 'Twas but March mere days ago, was it not? More than six months of the year are done and we have entered the seventh; the second half of 2023 is upon us and 2024 is closer than 2022.

Should the shock of onrushing time disconcert you, for consolation I offer a few lines of Lord Byron. But this is not consolation of the soft and sorry sort; here, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, we find defiance:

But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
Like the remember’d tone of a mute lyre,
Shall on their soften’d spirits sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.

Aye, that's the spirit. Let us defy this onrushing July, and not fle…