Areopagus Volume LXXXIV

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the eighty fourth volume of the Areopagus. There was no instalment last week — life intervened! But we return, a fortnight later, and as I look at the Moon it is the 16th century poet Pierre de Ronsard who comes to mind:

Thou knowest, Moon, the bitter power of Love;
’Tis told how shepherd Pan found ways to move,
For little price, thy heart; and of your grace,
Sweet stars, be kind to this not alien fire,
Because on earth ye did not scorn desire,
Bethink ye, now ye hold your heavenly place.

For how many millennia have we been contemplating that silver orb in the night sky? This is one of the ways, I think, we can understand our most distant ancestors, all over the world, directly. They did it in times gone by — we now, even with our Digital Age and living in our cities of glass, do the same. But enough pontificating: onwards!