Areopagus Volume LXIX

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the sixty ninth volume of the Areopagus. So dark the nights, so brief the days! But I must confess that these late weeks of Autumn are always welcome to me. There is something about the darkness which lends itself to deeper thought and reflection, I find, and that it is the long and starless nights which make me most love the sun that rises and burns away the fogs of dawn. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that there are few things I love more than staying up all the Autumn night to write. As Lord Byron said, and as I have quoted before, and as I would have engraved upon my plate:

I say, the sun is a most glorious sight,
I’ve seen him rise full oft, indeed of late
I have sat up on purpose all the night,
Which hastens, as physicians say, one’s fate;
And so all ye, who would be in the right
In health and purse, begin your day to date
From daybreak, and when coffin’d at fourscore,
Engrave upon the plate, you rose at four.

And there you have it. Now, before the sun…