Areopagus Volume LXXVI

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the seventy sixth volume of the Areopagus — simultaneously the closing of 2023 (I wrote it "last year") and the opening of 2024! But first, as they say, I interrupt your broadcast to make an important announcement: this will be the last Areopagus until February. There are some projects at hand that demand full attention. And so it would be a disservice to you, my Gentle and Perceptive Readers, were I to divide my attention between those projects and this beloved Areopagus. I endeavour only to give you my fullest; thus an intermission of four weeks is necessary. Fear not — the Areopagus shall return in force come the second month of 2024.

Where to begin? Tennyson can give us, I think, the feeling we need to tread these first and quaking steps out of the year that has passed, as we raise our hands to the lights of all that is soon to come:

But let no footstep beat the floor,
Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm;
For who would keep an ancient form
Thro' which the spirit brea…