Apse of St. Vitale, Ravenna

As I sipped my ale, watching Canada lose to Morocco, I wondered if I would have clean underwear tomorrow. Our bags were missing when we arrived at Heathrow. The airline didn’t know where they were, but my tracker told me they were, somehow, in Ottawa. Not that I could do anything about it. Just like my inability to help the Canadian soccer team. These days, although we may know more facts, sooner than we ever did before, it seems that more and more of our lives are beyond our control. Many fear a giant Orwellian thumb is coming down upon us.

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Perhaps, there is no choice – not just whether our bags will arrive with fresh underwear, or that the Canadians will win, but because the media, the government, and companies are all getting larger and with it, increasingly, reducing choice through enforcing conformity. I mean, some choice remains – I could go commando, or even wear a skirt and pretend to be a Scotsman tomorrow. But those are peripheral delusions, surely…

Some things in life we have to accept. One such inevitability is death. Other things we choose to fight – and we might win or lose. The human condition, in some ways, is about choice and acceptance.

After Canada lost the game, my bags arrived. I helped the driver unload them. He was out of breath, elderly, with an explosion of white hair on both sides of his bald head. He had a lined face. It was late, he was tired, and frustrated. He had had to wait for hours for a parade to pass. As he was self-employed, this affected him more than someone with the luxury of a salary. Clearly no scholar, he expressed his feelings with hands, facial expressions, jokes, and idioms. What he said was expressive, succinct, and funny. It was the humorous acceptance of an individual fighting the world alone and yet totally adrift.

Sometimes people use language to help them cope with life’s frustrations. Ancient Greeks had a language with syntax and semantics that encouraged complex thoughts. The language had options, such as the optative mood, the indefinite article and the middle voice. For example, it permitted the extraordinary effort the Greek-speaking Eastern Church spent in differentiating between homoousios (ὁμοούσιος) and homoiousios (ὁμοιούσιος), obscure concepts about the nature of God most consider to be pedantic and even divisive. Frankly, the two words look and sound funny. And thousands in the 4th Century died over this Arian controversy? Today, most people can’t spot the difference between theological position in these two Churches in Ravenna. Can you?

Latin, for example, could not easily define such ideas. Certainly, the Greek language helped express philosophical concepts that have enriched Western thought for over two thousand years. This has helped us deal with the inevitability of death. After all, why are we here, and what is, or can be, our purpose? English usage today, for comparison, is often misused as a result of corporations’ and politicians’ desires to obfuscate and this is aided by those not bothered by imprecision.

In addition to language, societies develop a culture around words. It is a way of dealing with the vagaries of life. Mexico is famous for mañana. The cultural mañana (tomorrow) not only means a more relaxed attitude to the clock’s relentless march, but it can also be a polite ‘no’ or ‘later’. In addition, it reflects a counter-argument to a consumer-driven world requiring greater haste and even unending work. Instead, the concept promotes family, relaxation and current happiness to override longer term, and often unnecessary goals.

Of course, generalizations can mislead or oversimplify complex circumstances. But they can be useful – even if they are only humorous stereotypes. We imagine a ‘couch potato’ is not thinking about the inevitability of approaching death, nor will he or she have given much thought to life’s choices. Another take on leisure are the Bengali words adda and lyaadh. My understanding is adda is a socio-cultural tradition of relaxed, earnest, intellectual conversations, while lyaadh incorporates a highly defined sense of doing nothing. This suggests, with a wry smile, perhaps, it is a more intelligent version of a couch potato. It is a way of being lazy, releasing stress, thinking about something alone, and doing it in a more single-minded way. Enjoy the nothingness! It can be a luxury, after all. A relaxed, purposeful time…. Is it a good way to accept one’s mortality without actually thinking about it?

Of course, language and customs are not the only way of dealing with approaching death. Hobbies and objects can be even more effective. Years ago, I was at an ISO welding standards committee in Bologna, Italy. (Yes, imagine the thrill of writing welding standards). I was talking to my brother via emails, describing how great the museum and how ancient the town square was, and he said I should visit Ravenna down the road. I jumped in my little Lancia Ypsilon and zoomed down that vision that haunts many a film, a scene of tall pine trees on either side of a straight road, arching over it, casting mottled shadows of their leaves on a sunny day, the wind in your ears….a memorable drive in itself.

When I got there, I discovered San Vitale. It was an epiphany for me. It is a 6^th century masterpiece of art and architecture. I was ‘gob-smacked’. In fact, the whole town overwhelmed me with its beauty. And today we don’t worry whether it is Arian or Orthodox (can you see the difference in the pictures above? Hint: Look how Christ is portrayed.) But these differences aren’t my point. The significance is the beauty of mosaics themselves. We are lucky when we come across such scenes or events in our lives. Such events show how good it is to be alive.

Perhaps seeking such events or achievements – or preserving such memories – is the very secret to life. The monumental fact that we all must die is better grasped when we have undergone some great event in our lives. Why else do we exist, if not to invent, refresh, or preserve something great? In other words, I shouldn’t have been worried so much about clean underwear tomorrow, but the clarity of this dispatch. Yes, you should, I guess, get up and build that bridge, but at least you were temporarily diverted from duty…

Which reminds me, my late mum used to quote from W. H. Davies’ poem Leisure:

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“So, how’s the wife?” Eric the husband says whenever he sees me, Never, “how are you?” so I respond, every time, with “Same as ever.” No, I never ask him how his wife is, as he is uninterested in anyone else, unlike me. He is, I think, borderline “mentally challenged,” to use the phrase the shrinks use, as I found out on the internet. Just now, saw him over the fence. He calls out “How’s the wife?” yet again. I answer “Same as ever,” which seems to satisfy him, as always, as his nods and smiles are quite predictable. I wonder what he would say if I answered, “Her cancer is now untreatable,” or “They’re taking her leg off next week.” I’d love to watch his reaction. But then I’d have to tell him it’s a joke, and I couldn’t do that: he doesn’t have a sense of humour at all, anyways. His wife plays country music loudly, so she’s beyond the pale. His dog barks all the time. He is overweight, eats too much crap, no doubt. He can’t even whistle properly. His cheerfulness is deeply annoying. It was only yesterday, as I was setting off for church, that he called out “How’s the wife?” I shut the car door and pretended not to hear him. I don’t take the bus any more: it’s either too late or too slow, or both, and I got places to be and things to do. The people at the bus stop are absolute morons. “A wet day, eh?” said one of them when it was raining. All the others nodded, just like robots. Why make a comment on something obvious? Dumb, dumb, dumb! Says one of them, “I see you’re wearing socks today” as if the guy usually wears snowshoes! I ask you. Another one tells the woman waiting in line, “So today’s the longest day of the year. Tomorrow will be shorter” No kidding! And the day after that, even shorter! Wonders never cease! Then we got kids on the bus from the public housing nearby. They swear, fight, try to get on without paying, and that was it. Bus driver did nothing. Now I drive. But then there’s idiots on the road, too…

At church, I thanked God I was not like other people, so many losers everywhere. That French guy got it right. He said, “Hell is other people.” How right he was: that fat woman, the old fellow who farts, the minister who sniffs, the women who tart themselves up just because it’s Sunday! I wear a T-shirt and jeans there, just as I do at home. I ducked out early before the collection plate passed. Everyone wants free money: why should I have to provide it?

As I was putting the car in the garage, Lintott sauntered in. “How’s the wife?” again. The same idiotic grin on his face. What a fool. Doesn’t know she moved out weeks ago. I’ve no idea why. I stopped listening to her whining a long time ago. It’s her loss, not mine.

“Christ,” he mutters to himself. “Last thing I need.”

Margot has been pressing Adam to have the talk with Paul, their ten-year-old son, man to man. Adam has been temporizing. He wants to be a buddy to his son, not an educator. He doesn’t say it but with sex education on the school curriculum, they are paying the experts to do this. Why not just get out of the way? What he says to Margot is that he doesn’t want to tell Paul anything that would create confusion. When she comes up with the idea of a parent-teacher meeting to put Adam in the picture, he runs out of excuses.

Paul is small for his age, at least two years away from puberty. However, he has plainly outgrown the standing family explanation, that Daddy put a seed into Mommy when they were sleeping. Out of the blue several weeks ago, during their ritual Sunday pizza night, Paul had casually wondered about something. Through a mouthful of Hawaiian it sounded like ‘gendular morphia.’

Margot and Adam had exchanged blank looks.

“That’s a new one for us,” Margot said. “But we’re glad you feel comfortable asking us, Paul. After all, that’s what we’re here for.”

“We’ll have to get back to you on this one,” Adam added.

After Paul was safely in bed, ‘gendular morphia’ had driven them to the Internet, which didn’t seem to have heard of it either. “gender dysphoria” was the closest they could find. But their little Paul? In Grade 5?

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As Adam enters the house, he hears Margot’s music. She often has it playing when she is cooking. Tonight it’s jazz he has heard before, a singer lamenting something.

In the kitchen he finds Margot stone-faced by the stove, stirring the contents of a pot. The rigidity in her small shoulders confirms what he sees in her face.

“Mmmm!” Adam says, hoping to mollify her. “That smells delicious!”

“Puttanesca,” she responds, not looking in his direction.

He flinches. Surely the choice of sauce – he vaguely remembers an association with women of loose morals – must be accidental. Margot couldn’t know about the woman on yesterday’s flight from Toronto, the way they had started talking so naturally. The way her lips had shaped the words. Her voice and the glances that lingered, the feeling of her closeness beside him.

Her business card is in his wallet. It shouldn’t be there and he knows it. If only he could stop thinking about her. But something in him doesn’t want to.

“Margot, I’m really sorry,” Adam says. “The clay bed under Regency Court is deeper than we thought. We spent the day in emergency meetings. I didn’t even have time for lunch--”

“I had a good conversation with Miss Amyot about the sex curriculum,” Margot interrupts. “It focuses on relationships and respect as much as biology, Adam. I was very impressed and it’s too bad you didn’t have a chance to talk to her about it. You could have learned something.”

“Yes, Margot. I hear you. I’m really sorry. Very sorry, but there isn’t anything I can do about it now. I’m glad you managed to get there and it went well.

“Do they...you know,” he continues. “Will he know about the basic physical stuff?”

“Yes, in Grade 5 they cover the reproductive system and how the body changes during puberty. But as I said...”

Margot can’t resist her little reminders.

“...They put a lot of emphasis on the relationships that the physical things happen inside of, on respect and caring for others. It’s very different from the way it was for us and I guess that’s why some of it has gotten so controversial.”

“OK,” Adam says. “So what’s left for me to deal with then?”

“Miss Amyot said that now is the perfect time for you to talk to him about what he will experience with puberty, from a man’s point of view. And sex too, before things start to happen.”

“Yes, like we’ve both been thinking.”

Sometimes Margot needs to be reminded that Adam is not her junior partner. Too late, he realizes this was not the time.

“Margot, you’re very good with Paul,” he tries to warm the chill intensifying in the room. “He’ll be able to talk with you when he needs to. I wish I’d had parents like that when I was his age. I guess we both do.”

Paul is their common ground, regardless of what else seems to be happening in their marriage. For Adam, their love for their son continues to make them a team.

“If there’s time before dinner, I could start talking to him right now,” Adam says, seeing a chance to redeem himself. “Sooner the better, right?”

Margot nods agreement. Rewards him with a brief smile of encouragement.

Adam heads for Paul’s room. He is grateful that his role in sex education is deflecting attention from the parent-teacher meeting that was minus one of the parents.

There is no point going on about it with Margot, but his day was a tough one. The meeting with the foundation people ran long. A deep clay pocket at the site hadn’t been picked up in the initial survey. Adam is the business man, they are the experts and delegating is one of his secrets of success. When they present the problem without a recommended solution, he files a mental note to look for another sub-contractor. Eventually, thanks to input from Adam’s project manager, a plan to install helical piles as well as excavating and filling beyond original specifications is adopted. But everything is connected to everything else. You can’t get away from this. Cost-savings elsewhere will be needed. Maybe design changes. Schedules will need to be renegotiated. Problems, problems.

Adam strides to Paul’s doorway. He enjoys being decisive, getting things done. He hopes he can have a big-brother-to-little-brother kind of chat with his son, good buddies hanging out together and figuring life out.

Paul is at his desk, facing a rhythmically flashing computer screen.

“Hi Dad,” he says, as Adam enters the room. “I almost got to level 7. Hamid got there yesterday and I was trying to stay with him but a solar storm just got me.”

“Well,” Adam says, wondering what kind of game Paul is playing. “At least you survived to fight another day and sooner or later, you’ll ...er... get there.

“So, how was your day?” Adam’s question feels awkward, almost formal. He wonders if Paul notices.

“OK.” Paul’s voice is expressionless.

Adam stands by Paul’s bed momentarily, then settles cautiously onto it. He is twenty years away from college football but his back still reminds him of the price to be paid for campus stardom.

“So…,” he takes a breath. “Mom and I think it’s time for you and me to be talking about ...ah...growing up, and puberty. You’re soon going to be a man, Paul, and I can talk about what that’s like, you know, with the changes and everything.”

Adam hears his father in his voice. His father, long ago.

“So, how about we talk a bit before dinner, OK?”

“Yah, I guess,” Paul mumbles, eyes fixed on his screen.

“I went through the same thing with my dad, you know,” Adam continues. “Grandpa was a terrific father, but he wasn’t comfortable talking about this stuff. So it made me uncomfortable. I never really went to him with questions, even when I had them. And then after he and Grandma got their divorce….”

Adam pauses. How could he have gotten off topic already?

“Anyway,” he resumes, “Let’s do it better. Why don’t we start with what they’ve taught you at school. No point me telling you what you already know, eh?”

“Well, I guess we’ve mostly done it,” Paul says. “You know, about how babies get made, and what the names are for the sex organs and all that. And this year, we’ve already been doing puberty. So I’ve learned what’s supposed to be happening to me, and what’s happening to the girls too. And..,” he goes silent.

“Yes?” Adam says. “Remember, I went through this too. Nothing you’re going to tell me is going to surprise me. We’re on the same team here, buddy. So if you have any questions, Paul...”

“Well…,” Paul hesitates, now looking intently at a planetary map on his bedroom wall. “It’s just that nothing seems to be happening to me yet. Some of the guys at school are starting to get, you know, like pubic hair, and...”

“I hear you,” Adam says. “They should have told you that things don’t always happen to everybody at the same time. You’re ten, so I bet they aren’t happening to a lot of the other guys yet either. I didn’t start getting pubic hair until I was about twelve. It might run in our family, maybe.”

“OK,” Paul says. “So I don’t have to do anything? I just wait?”

“Basically, yes,” Adam says.

“And what about what happens between men and women?” Adam continues. “Do you have any questions about that?”

“Well, not really,” Paul says. “Except we learned that sometimes men might want to be close with other men, and women might feel that way about other women too. So what about that? I mean---”

“Yes, sorry,” Adam interrupts. “You’re right. Or I mean they’re right. I should have mentioned that too. It’s another way the whole thing can go.

“Puberty and everything that goes with it is something that just happens to us, Paul. We don’t always choose what happens, you know. It’s all part of life, basically.”

Paul nods.

“Puberty brings these new urges,” Adam continues, “and they can be really strong urges. And like you’ve learned in school, they often are between men and women but they don’t have to be. I’m wondering if you have any questions about that part, what actually happens when, you know, people decide to have sex.”

“Not exactly, Dad,” he says. “We covered that in school too, sort of. And...well, Jimmy found these videos online where men and women were doing stuff to each other.”

“I remember being pretty shocked about it when I was your age,” Adam says.

Paul is looking at his father now. The face under the over-sized Blue Jays ball cap is anxious. That cap, Adam thinks. It makes Paul look so small.

Adam gropes for words. How is he to explain it all?

Paul is talking. Adam tries to focus.

“Totally gross!” Paul is saying. “Why would people want to do that to each other anyway? And I bet it hurts the women. So I’m not going to do it. There’s no way I’d do that to a girl. Or anybody.”

Adam remembers how he had felt when he first learned what were then called “the facts of life.” He remembers the vertiginous feeling, wondering what else in his world would suddenly turn out to be so different.

“Well,” he says. “Believe it or not, Paul, I remember feeling the same way. It’s just not something that you would ever imagine people doing. We don’t choose to be this way, it’s just the way we’re made. It’s the way life continues. We have these needs that make us keep the species going.”

“Well, I’m not. I don’t see why I have to keep the species going, Dad.”

“I get that, Paul,” he says. “Nobody asked us, right? But we’re just made that way. It’s like, well…it’s just like needing food. We don’t choose to be hungry either. It just happens to us. And then we need to find something to eat, because mother nature is making sure we stay alive so we can keep the species going. And eating when you’re hungry, biting into a delicious pizza or something, you already know that’s pretty awesome, right?”

Paul looks mystified but Adam is warming to his analogy and doesn’t notice.

“Imagine that you hadn’t ever eaten anything,” he says. “You’re part of a world where you and your friends don’t need to eat. You just play games all day and play with all the animals too. And then people come along and tell you that soon you’re going to feel that you need to kill the animals and eat them...”

Paul’s nose wrinkles.

“Gross, Dad! I don’t see what killing things and pizza has to do with puberty---”

“No but Paul, what I’m trying to say...” How can words help his son, instead of making him even more confused? We want to be with him through this, but how can we? Experience happens inside us; we all have it alone.

Margot is waiting in the kitchen. Even now, the woman on the plane is in his mind, the more he tries not to think of her. Adult life is out there. It is out there, waiting for his son. There is nothing Adam can do about it.

But Paul is reaching out. He needs his Dad to be there for him.

“Paul, what happens may look gross but when it actually happens to you, when you actually feel it, it’s going to be awesome for you.”

Paul looks unconvinced.

“All I can tell you is that we all need to do the best we can. Mom is a terrific person and she and I, we do the best we can. It’s not simple, Paul. Life may look simple but it isn’t. None of us know why we’re here or what we’re supposed to be doing. Sometimes we even do things when we know they’re wrong. But as long as we’re alive, we have these wants and needs and we just have to figure things out as we go along.”

Paul sits in his chair, mystified again.

Adam feels exhausted; trying to think of what to say to Paul, trying not to think of how he felt last night. He finds himself staring hopefully at the wall, at the planetary map.

“Miss Amyot keeps telling us we shouldn’t just think about ourselves,” Paul says. “Yes, that’s a good point for sure,” Adam responds. “Sometimes that part isn’t easy but life can be great, Paul, and we want yours to be great too.”

“I have a lot of things to like,” Paul says. “But puberty is gross. I’m just going to try and enjoy being a kid while I still am one, Dad.”

“I don’t blame you,” Adam says, giving his shoulder a gentle punch. “You’re a pretty good kid and Mom and I are really proud of you. I’m going to go and help her finish up with dinner. We’re not going to let you go hungry. At least that’s something we can do.”

Adam makes his way down the hall.

He feels it before he is aware of it. Cole Porter’s classic is flowing from the kitchen speakers: Let’s Fall in Love.

“Birds do it; bees do it

Even educated fleas do it...”

Euphoria dances in the melody. The singer’s voice is warm honey, riding the sound with longing and wistfulness, awareness that everything ends. It’s as if life is singing to him, wonderful inexplicable life. The journey we take on our own.

About the Author:

Jack Stilborn reads voraciously and writes fiction. The Tyranny of Good Intentions, his satirical novel about politics, was published in 2025 (Chicken House Press). His short stories can be found in Blank Spaces, The Spadina Review, MTLS and Allium. He lives in Ottawa, Canada. His website is at www.jackstilborn.com.

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?

Hamlet: Between who?

Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

What follows is a review of two outstanding recent books on the value of reading, which is essential to the development of writing. Each is one side of the gold coin that is effective communication, a skill a civilized society neglects at its peril.

Those who value a civil literate culture have for some time now expressed concern about threats to its continued existence. Enrolment in undergraduate humanities courses has dwindled. The quality of written and spoken English is increasingly characterized by carelessness, crudeness, and ignorance. Independent bookshops have closed, newspapers are in financial difficulties, the sensational or trivial ‘sound bite’ has replaced thoughtful discussion of public affairs, and strident ideologically-based activism has compromised serious debate in the public sphere. The joyful, life-affirming discoveries made by solitary readers far from the clamour of the madding crowd are being overlooked. Only still waters, we appear to have forgotten, run deep—and empty vessels, after all, make the most sound-- or have we also forgotten these tried truisms?

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Two important books on reading draw attention to this state of affairs. Both Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading in the Age of Distraction (2019) and Maryanne Wolf in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018) argue that the quiet enjoyment provided by reading is threatened by ‘distraction,’ by the intrusive effects of “digital dependency.”

Cellphones’ ring-tones, peremptory workplace-related e-mails, gossipy texting, the omnipresence of video, and the rants of anonymous uninformed contributors to ‘social media’ can all be combated, they insist, by reading that begins early, and is deep, wide, and critical. Social media have effectively, if unintentionally, legitimized the provocative diatribes of the proudly uncivil present occupant of the White House, himself, at least in part, a creation of the celebrity media culture he affects to despise and deplore. Maryanne Wolf quotes Barack Obama, a more literate and civil leader than his successor Trump, who worried that for too many young people information has become “a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a means of emancipation.” Wolf also quotes Mark Edmundson, professor of English and author of Why Read? who laments that his students, “swimming in entertainment…have been sealed off from the chance to call everything they’ve valued into question, to look at new ways of life…. For them, education is knowing and lordly spectatorship, never the Socratic dialogue about how one ought to live one’s life.”

Long before they can read for themselves, children need to be read to, asserts Ms. Gurdon, a book critic, essayist, and former foreign correspondent. Those whose parents have read to them share a bond of intimacy with them that gives these children enormous advantages in school and later life. Reading aloud exposes the child to new vocabulary, exercises her imagination, encourages patience and listening skills, helps her to identify herself sympathetically with others, and improves her comprehension while she is beguiled by story. Reading aloud, Gurdon says, “furnishes the mind.” The following dialogue between my then four-year-old granddaughter and her mother is surely proof of the kind of sharing that empowers both child and parent:

Mum (reading): “Then Beast said to Beauty, ‘You may go anywhere in the castle except for the West Wing. That is forbidden.’”

Granddaughter (listening, spellbound): “Who is Bidden?”

Mum (after explanation, continuing): “The Beast fought the wolves fiercely and drove them away from Beauty.”

Granddaughter: “Like, drove them in a car?”

Ms. Gurdon goes to great lengths to demonstrate that classic children’s stories (her book contains a comprehensive list of these in her Notes) also provide moral lessons, cultural literacy, and the means to transform the lives of listeners and readers, moving examples of which she includes in a series of anecdotes. As for her sterling defence of the need to pass on to the next generation the treasures of our culture, she reminds her readers of Chairman Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s, during which “old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture” were unceremoniously ditched with catastrophic consequences for Chinese society. She is correctly dismissive of political correctness in all of its guises, providing quotations from Russell Baker, Ray Bradbury, and others in support of her view. The correct response to an ‘offensive’ passage in a work that is a product of its time, merely reflecting the era’s attitudes and values, she suggests, should not be moral outrage and cries for censorship, but an incentive to further reading. She is the mother of five children herself, and gives freely of her own experiences of reading to them over the years. Her tone is confident, cheerfully assertive, frequently humorous, and refreshingly optimistic. Her concern is primarily with reading aloud to children, but it is undeniable that the blind, the bedridden, reluctant English students, and the elderly can also benefit from listening to a book read aloud. Although she recommends audiobooks, especially for families on long car drives, she speaks only briefly of them. A more comprehensive view of the joys and benefits of listening to audiobooks voiced by skilled professionals can be found in an article by Ian Brown, Audiobooks Come of Age, which appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail on Saturday, July 13, 2019.

According to a Yale study, people who read for pleasure live an average of two years longer than non-readers. One of the study’s authors maintains that literature “can promote empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence,” cognitive processes that can lead to fuller, longer lives. Maryanne Wolf is in emphatic agreement with him on this last point.

Ms. Wolf, an academic perhaps better known as the author of Proust and the Squid, a study of how our brain learns to read, is primarily concerned in her most recent book with what she calls ‘deep reading,’ by which she means reading that makes us feel and think long after we have finished reading a memorable book, essay, poem, or passage. “Deep reading,” she continues, “is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live our lives in a connected world.” She fears a future ruled by distracting digital devices, and cites Patricia Greenfield in this regard: “Although… the Internet may develop impressive visual intelligence, the cost seems to be deep processing: mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.” Digital dependency means that those deprived of their devices are easily bored. Even those who read on a Kindle are less proficient readers than those who read from an identical text in a book, as a European study cited has concluded. Attention spans today are already alarmingly short. Two-thirds of fourth-grade US children, Ms. Wolf reports, “do not read at a ‘proficient’ level, that is, fluently and with adequate comprehension.” What is called ‘skimming’ of e-mail, rather than careful, time-consuming analysis of content, is the “new normal” in the workplace. We are a hurried society, intent upon instant gratification, with little time for reverie and reflection, yet our survival as a species depends on our ability to ponder, to reflect, to imagine. No scientific discovery would ever have been made without the searcher’s first question: “What if…?”

There are three distinct and very real benefits to deep reading, asserts Ms. Wolf. These are increased empathy, reflection, and critical thinking. To C.S. Lewis, she reminds us, has been attributed the saying “We read to know that we are not alone.” E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End begins with the command “Only connect.” By sympathetic identification with others we meet in books, particularly with those who suffer, we make that connection, we share that suffering. We know we are not alone, and that we have a responsibility in life to engage with others. This is empathy or “compassionate imagination.” “When we read fiction,” the author tells us, “the brain actively simulates the consciousness of another person.…It allows us to try on…what it means to be another person.” We become Hamlet. We become Anna Karenina, Scout Finch, or Pooh Bear.

Reflection is the ability after reading a text to draw upon and add to what the reader already knows from earlier reading and life experience, to see it all with “a quiet eye,” in order to lead readers “even deeper into insights from the text or beyond them … to the invisible presence of the mind that reads behind, within, and between the words.” This of course assumes that we already have a storehouse of experience to build upon, and it is for this reason that Ms. Wolf advocates early and repeated immersion in the reading pool, so as to increase what she calls the “internalized knowledge” acquired by the reader herself on her own initiative. She recalls the time when reading opened up new horizons for her that were wider than the “two-room eight-grade schoolhouse” of her childhood in rural Eldorado, Illinois. There is a becoming humility in her recollections of how little she once knew, and how indebted she realizes she later became to what she read. It explains why she says that “the last thing” our society needs is “what Socrates feared: young people thinking they know the truth before they ever begin the arduous practice of searching for it.” A life of reflection is “one in which—whatever genre we are reading—we enter a totally invisible realm… where we can contemplate all manner of human existence and ponder a universe whose real mysteries dwarf any of our imagination.”

Critical thinking, the third benefit of deep reading, requires a skeptical reader to examine a writer’s words carefully and dispassionately for “manipulative” or “superficial” information. He must also be open to changing his own mind. Mark Edmundson, whom Wolf quotes, again approvingly, asks “What good is this power of critical thought if you do not yourself believe something and are not open to having these beliefs modified?” Too many young people, Edmundson says, lack any such belief system. Perhaps they have not read and reflected enough. Ms. Wolf warns that, as a result, “their ability to learn the kind of critical thinking necessary for deeper understanding can become stunted. Intellectual rudderlessness and adherence to a way of thought that allows no questions are threats to critical thinking in us all.” Jordan Peterson, author of the best-selling Twelve Rules for Life has repeatedly made the same point—but that is the subject for another review.

Sir Francis Bacon memorably wrote

Popcorn is not nutritious enough to constitute a good diet. Entertaining but eminently forgettable romances or thrillers likewise lack nutrition, and are best swallowed whole. The two books reviewed here, however, are to be chewed and digested. If we have an appetite for thoughtful reading, they will satisfy our hunger for clarity, common sense, and insight. They are good for our digestion—and for our direction.

You ask me why I live in a dumpster? My friend, it’s my choice. Let me explain: The gods have everything and want nothing; you think you have nothing, and want everything. A cat is god-like as it wants little. Sure, I like fresh tuna - especially if someone else catches one for me. But the dumpster is a fine palace for me. Keep things as simple as you can.

We all have to live. But I choose the life to follow; I think for myself, I follow my own path. I do not care for the people who follow the popular road. These people will bend according to the wind. What sort of person enjoys doing what everyone else does? Is that life? Might as well be a robot, I say. And your life is simpler if you don’t have to worry about what other people are doing and saying.

And doing and saying are never the same. Orators and leaders say one thing and do something different - or nothing. There is a disconnect between action and words. There is no pursuit of virtue or a better life. Why chase a shadow? They lie every time. When will you learn?

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Why did the rich man throw me out of his house? He promised me fresh fish. But it smelled bad. Just like how they promise you status and money. So I told him it was rotten. Exile, he called it, when he threw me out. First, it isn’t exile if you realize it is freedom. If you accept the rotten fish - your status and money - what do you now owe him? It is still a smelly fish.

So, I like my dumpster. Second, he called me a cynic. I’m not a cynic. I object to being called a cynic. A cynic comes from the word cynikos, meaning ‘dog-like’, as in a dog fawning when given anything. A cat is a lion; cats do not fawn. The fat rich man wanted a slave. That’s not me. You want to be a dog?

I used to lie on his deck sunning myself, and he would come and stand over me and block my sun. It is nice to have the warm sun on my back. But it is ephemeral. The sun goes behind a cloud. You don’t aspire for the fleeting warmth of the sun. You seek something longer lasting. Like truth, and virtue. Don’t seek happiness; it is the wrong word. Happiness is too empty, too thoughtless.

You don’t want the ‘bones’ of the matter - that is what a dog chews on. A cat wants the marrow of the bone - the essence. Harder to get; so much more rewarding. I told him not to stand in the sun. I also told him he should strive to be more like me. He didn’t like that. My self-control makes me free. If I don’t want much, I am beholden less to others. I become more free. And I like being free. The rich man doesn’t want you to be free.

If I can, I ignore what I want. It is both philosophical and physical. It is true it can be a brutal simplicity.

I hiss at most rogues. That is the real reason I am not liked. Rogues do not like to be known as rogues. Rogues want people – or animals – who can spurn the obvious truth. They like dogs. Where I used to live, the rich man peed on his dog and the dog said, “Please do it again.” A dog is not a cat; a cat would not accept such treatment. I feel for the spineless dog. Where I live now, the garbage does not pretend to be anything but garbage.

The rich man’s children were OK. Besides giving me cuddles and tickles, children reveal the truth when they blush. When they lose that complexion, they are lost. I prefer to be away from the dishonest. Give me a child of a human any day over a grownup human. They like simplicity, too.

So you want a better life? Escape the prison they prepare for you - don’t accept the ‘happiness’ they offer you; it is not fulfilling. If you want to be fed, you must be hungry – and you must choose the food you eat to be satiated. Gorging does not make you happy. Pleasure leads to defeat. And too much pleasure dulls you anyway.

Instead, aspire for what you want - even if it is your own prison. Your own prison is far from a prison. You are the master of your own fate if it is your prison, anyway. You will find you need less, and that, paradoxically, less is, in fact, more. With a mind of your own, you will realize you are far from the prison. Your mind is free. And they cannot take that from you. You have found the truth.

And how do I know it is the truth? Truth cannot come from just agreeing with what you are told. You have to suffer. You suffer when you see the consequences of your actions. So it takes time to learn the truth. The actions of others do not tell you the truth as you never really know their reasons for their actions until you have to make the choice yourself. Then you have real happiness - and wisdom.

Now, I need one of my Tuna Smokes. Did you bring me my Tuna Smokes?

But before the angel became an emperor, he was a Victory.

During the Early Christian era, the iconography of the angel was connected with funerary art and the Resurrection of the soul, following classical prototypes. A beautiful example is the child sarcophagus of Sariguzel, from the third or fourth century, in the Archaeological Museum of Constantinople. Two carved winged angels, reminiscent of the triumphant figures of Victories and Eros of Greco-Roman art, bring aloft the tabula ansata, a medallion inscribed with the name of the dead. The classical form persists, only its meaning has changed.

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Yet another, older influence shaped the early iconography of angels within churches: the worship of the Sun-cult of the East. The theme of the Axis-Mundi, the axis of the world, appears on the domes and groined-vaults of the early churches, revealing the astrological origins and beliefs of the period. In the mosaic from the Archbishop’s Chapel in Ravenna, dating from 404-519, four Caryatid-Angels support the sphere of the sun with the initial of Jesus Christ within, while the symbols of the four Evangelists - the tetramorph - complete the composition.

The obsession of the artists with the symmetry of the number four - the four points of the horizon - sets the pattern for this Axis-Mundi iconography. It is worth noting that the initial X within a sphere is also the symbol of Mithra, indicating the “precession of the equinoxes”, another planetary conception drawn from the Platonic Cosmogony of the Timaeus.

The idea is even older. In Egyptian cosmogony, the goddess of the sky Nut arches her naked body above the Earth to accommodate the daily course of the Sun. In the lid of the sarcophagus of Ankh-ness-Nefer-ib-Re, daughter of Psamtik II, dating from 663-525 BC, Nut is depicted as another caryatid, directing the Sun above - a prototype the Byzantine mosaicists would have recognized.

In the mosaic from San Vitale in Ravenna, dating from 546-548, four Caryatid-Angels in the groined-vault support the symbol of Christ - the Lamb - within a sphere, like the sun. Flowery ribbons divide the space in the letter X. The Angels step on blue spheres, and their appearance reminds us of classical Victories; their frontality, however, transcends reality. By the mosaic of St. Zenon’s Chapel in Rome, dating from 820, the four Caryatid-Angels stretching out to support the Pantocrator still resemble classical Victories. But the pagan elements are steadily being shed as the Greek Orthodox Church imposes its iconographic rules.

What follows is a remarkable evolution across the great domes. In the mosaic from Santa Sophia in Thessalonica, from the ninth century, the theme is adapted to that of the Ascension, with two flying angels lifting a colorful circle indicating the seven spheres of the universe.

In the fresco from Santa Sophia in Ochrid, dating from 1037-1056, four flying angels support a sphere with seven concentric circles in pure white, indicating the seven spheres in which the Almighty has Ascended. And in the mosaic from Santa Sophia in Kiev, circa 1037, the Pantocrator as Logos is surrounded by four Archangels wearing imperial costumes, their chests crossed by the loros, painted as individual portraits. The celestial and terrestrial dominions have merged into one and the same.

This merging finds its most explicit expression in the mosaic from St. Apollinaire Nuovo in Ravenna, from the sixth century, which shows Jesus Christ in Glory flanked by Archangels clad in white with the clavus, the patrician stripe, in their chiton. Christ is seated and holds a lamp. The frontality and rigidity of the figures denote the Byzantine protocol of the imperial court translated directly into sacred art.

Eventually, Angels will multiply in this composition, which takes on a new liturgical form: the Synaxis of the Asomatoi - the Congregation of the Incorporeal Ones. All the Celestial Hierarchies, holding the Christ child painted into a mandorla, participate in the celebration of mass. Orthodox liturgy had to include the Angels in its ritual, for they are, after all, the messengers with whom humankind will placate the Numinous. Christ serves in the twin role of the King of Kings and the Archpriest, presiding over the liturgy of both men and Angels. The fresco from Mystras depicts Angels, Principalities, and Dominions in a choir around God’s throne, dressed in chiton and mantle with the strip of purple colour, like the outfit of the Roman patricians, indicative of their nobility. The white ribbon around their hair symbolizes their purity, and their anonymity is the sign of their multitudes and power.

Among all the celestial host, it is the Archangel Michael who commands the most attention. Assigned the role of Stratilatis, Commander of the armies of the Lord, his warrior’s outfit was based on the Consular Diptychs of the period, such as that of Probus Anicius from the fourth century. If we compare the depictions of Michael across the centuries, a striking evolution emerges: in the ivory of the sixth century, he resembles a Roman Victory. In the marble plaque from the twelfth century, the Archangel wears the klapoton loros - the studded ceremonial sash - and resembles a priest; here the portrait transcends the physical beauty of the Archangel into the otherness of the divine. In Ravenna, Michael and Gabriel are garbed like the Emperor Justinian himself, with mantle and tavlion, wearing red shoes studded with precious stones. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Archangels resemble more and more the Byzantine Dignitaries in similar costumes.

Pseudo-Dionysius in his Celestial Hierarchies offered many details for the iconography of Angels, and it was in these descriptions that the hagiographers found their inspiration. The sublime beauty of the Angels moved artists to portray them more often than other figures from the Bible. Few realistic depictions, however, are able to do justice to their radiance. The icon of the Angel with the Golden Hair is a superb exception. Dating from the twelfth century and housed in the State Museum of Leningrad, the hagiographer has captured not only the physical beauty of the face but also the otherness of the divine beauty, that quality which distinguishes the celestial from the merely beautiful.

According to ancient belief, messages were delivered by the flying wind; hence the angels were given wings. It is a thought worth pausing on. We began this series with wingless bulls carved in steatite, fixed to the thresholds of Sumerian temples four thousand years ago - heavy, earthbound guardians whose power lay in their mass and their refusal to move. From there, the angel acquired wings from the Assyrians, moral purpose from the Zoroastrians, rank and hierarchy from the apocalyptists and Pseudo-Dionysius, and imperial splendour from the Byzantine court. Yet what the Angel with the Golden Hair finally captures is something none of those traditions, on their own, could have produced: the intuition that the divine does not announce itself through terror or spectacle, but through beauty. That a painted face, gazing out from a twelfth-century panel, can still stop a viewer in the twenty-first century is perhaps the most persuasive argument the angels have ever made.

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?

Hamlet: Between who?

Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

(Hamlet, II,ii)

Many years ago now, when I was in Grade XIII, my last year of high school, our class was treated to a course in ‘speed-reading,’ a skill its proponents claimed would enable us to read fast enough to be able to assimilate large amounts of prescribed reading material at university in an orderly fashion, as it was assigned, thereby relieving us of the anxiety of being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of reading that would, we were told, be the university’s expectation of all undergraduates. Our high school was well-known for its disproportionate share of the city’s Ontario Scholars, and surely we would all long to have our names enshrined for all eternity on the prominently-displayed ‘Roll of Honour’ in the entrance hall, wouldn’t we? Well, absorbing the “techniques” of reading quickly would, it was alleged, heighten our chances of success in the three or four years of relentless reading that would be required of us soon.

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I have to confess that I responded badly to the invitation to join this class. I had been, in childhood, a voracious reader, regularly reading a book a day from the school library, reading much of it on the school bus home, unperturbed by my growing reputation as a bookworm. I had continued to read voluminously since, and resented the assumption that I was too slow or stupid to continue to read well. In retirement today, I regularly read in excess of 150 books a year, recording my reaction to each book in my diaries, but I am now, blessedly, freer to do so.

More importantly, I was aware, even then, half a century ago, that different books required different reading speeds. If reading material were more demanding, if the vocabulary or sentence structure were that of a bygone age, as was clearly the case with classic novels like Robinson Crusoe, it would take longer to read. If the subject matter itself was unfamiliar, the same would be the case. I vividly recall my pride when my father asked me to read out to him articles from the TIME magazine at the age of ten as I sat beside him in the car. I knew well, in my teenage years, that some poetry, and especially sonnets and Shakespearean soliloquys, cannot be read quickly. They need to be pondered and reflected upon over time. Unseemly haste was, and remains, fatal to understanding. The woman who “taught” the ‘speedo’ course was then unable to understand my passionate objections, and I was once even detained after school for volubly denouncing speed-reading’s “techniques,” but in those days adolescents were expected to mind their manners and keep silent. Needless to say, “speed-reading” has now, mercifully, fallen into disfavour. Too many graduates freely admit that they did not read all that was assigned. Reading lists for some classes have become optional, and the serious reading public has diminished in size. As bookstores vanish and media images proliferate, “media study” has now replaced much book-learning in the public education systems of North America, where ‘dumbing down’ now reigns supreme so that no child may be “left behind.”

Yet reading is still crucial for all aspects of life, and its benefits are legion. The skilled reader knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff, but he or she needs to read widely and frequently to be able to differentiate between the two. Regular reading needs to begin early. Young children love to be read to, for a love of story, of rhyme and repetition, seems to be innate to all humans from a very early age, and parental reading to children provides parent and child with opportunities for ‘bonding’. Reading for children and adults alike has great entertainment value, valuable as this is in its proper time and place, but there is much more. Reading provides escape from the stress of everyday living by exercising the imagination. It aids in vocabulary acquisition, and improves sentence structure in both oral and written expression. It also increases attention span, patience, and listening skills. Reading also, arguably even more importantly, counteracts the toxic distractions of ‘digital dependency.’ “Deep reading,” which will be explored in next month’s review of books dealing with ‘levels’ of reading readiness, improves cognitive processes by promoting reflection, emotional intelligence, and empathy, sometimes called ‘compassionate imagination.’ Studies have shown that reading not only helps you live longer, but also can make you a better person, as wide and critical reading is a form of self-improvement, as will shortly be seen.

To repeat: early reading is crucial, but it is never too late to begin. The writer Jane Gardam remembers how she, as a four-year-old, explained to her mother the meaning of the word ‘soporific’ that she had come across in a Beatrix Potter story about rabbits. She had worked out its meaning from its context, without the help of a dictionary. My granddaughter Marlowe, then only two years of age, remarked, as we passed a house undergoing renovations across the street while her parents and I were out for an evening walk, “There’s just one problem with that house. It has no windows.” This seemed a very adult way to describe the house, and the mystery of its source was solved later that evening when I read to her from her favourite bedtime story, Cinderella, the following words, delivered to her in the form of a warning from her fairy godmother: “There’s just one problem with our plan: you must leave the ball before midnight.” My son Adrian has always been a devoted reader. At the age of twelve, he wrote the following in connection with an assignment on Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf: “While Mowat was in the den, he realized that the wolf was not the bloodthirsty savage killer which it had been portrayed to be, for if it were to be as described, it could easily have attacked him when he was inside the den, alone and exposed, with no weaponry whatsoever.” The beautiful balance of this compound-complex sentence, with its correct use of the conditional and the legitimate use of the old-fashioned word ‘weaponry’ is testament to the various literary influences on his work that have borne fruit unconsciously, effortlessly, in his writing, as a direct result of his wide and thoughtful reading.

Allan Bloom, author of the seminal study The Closing of the American Mind, should have the last word on the importance of reading. He famously declared,

On the evening of July 26, The Irony Club is opening the mic again, and we’re widening it considerably. It will run the way an open mic ought to: you bring a piece and read it, and meet people, old and new. You’ll like it.

Here is what’s different this time.

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Read to us in the language you think in. Meaning comes from sound, from rhythm, from the words; the totality of expression. Understanding comes with listening. We may not need to understand every syllable - but we want to try! So whatever language is yours, bring it. We want the tongues the piece was born to. We learn insights and want to appreciate the subtleties of other tongues. The purpose of language is to enlighten. Come and show us! Translations can help us learn, too.

And it needn’t be a poem or a page of prose. Spoken word, a couplet, a monologue, a play, a song, a translation, all that has a place at this mic.

We are here simply to hear your work out loud, in good company, and to return the favour by listening well to everyone else. If you’d rather not read at all, that’s a fine way to spend the evening, too. It will be a memorable evening, we assure you.

The details:

July 26, 2026 · Doors open 5:30 PM Mayil Coffee, 870 College St, Toronto

• Readings in any language warmly welcome

• Prose, poetry, spoken word, song, translation — and forms yet unclassified

• A few minutes (2-5) each at the mic

• Sign-ups at the venue welcome

• Come to read, or simply to listen

• Conversation guaranteed, before and after

Seats are limited and tend to disappear, so it’s worth booking ahead. Tickets are $20, through Mayil:

https://mayilcoffee.com/product/mayil-alfaaz-with-irony-club-july-26/

We hope you drop in and enjoy some good company, or at the very least, a very good cup of coffee.

The Book of Enoch, written between roughly 200 and 100 BC, survives only in an Ethiopic translation from a lost Greek original, recovered at the end of the eighteenth century and translated by the scholar R.H. Charles in 1912. Enoch introduced the fallen angels - those celestial beings who ‘lusted after the daughters of men’ and brought about the Fall of mankind, establishing the participation of the Prophet Enoch in the glory of the Divine. But more significantly for our purposes, Enoch named and ranked the seven Archangels, assigning each a precise domain: “Uriel is over the world and over the Tartars. Raphael is over the spirit of men. Raquel takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries. Michael, one of the holy angels, to wit, he that is set over the best part of mankind and over chaos. Saraqael is set over the spirits, who sin in the spirit. Gabriel is over Paradise and the serpents and the Cherubim. Remiel, whom God set over those who rise.”

This was a celestial bureaucracy with clear lines of authority. The fallen angels were chained to the Tartarus without mercy, despite Enoch’s plea to the mighty God. And Enoch’s apocalyptic vision of the divine throne drew on the same ecstatic phraseology as Ezekiel and Isaiah: “And I looked and saw a lofty throne: its appearance was a crystal and the wheels thereof as the shining sun, and there was the vision of cherubim. And from underneath the throne came streams of flaming fire so I could not look thereon. And the Great Glory sat thereon, and His raiment shone more brightly than the sun and was whiter than any snow. None of the angels could enter and could behold. Ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him, yet He needed no counsellor.”

Compare closely the seven Assyro-Babylonian Amesh-Spentas we encountered in the previous essay with Enoch’s seven Archangels, and their functions converge: the Creator in both cases is the pure Spirit of Light, so radiant that even Enoch, the Elect of God, cannot look upon Him. Likewise, St. John in the Book of Revelations refers to the “seven stars” which the Son of God holds in his right hand - a common apocalyptic preoccupation with astrological images that again echoes the planetary symbolism of the older Persian tradition.

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When the Book of Revelations was incorporated into the canonical texts, the domain of Lucifer and its hierarchy was fast established in Western iconography around the ninth century. The mosaic from the Cathedral of Torchello, dating from the twelfth century, shows demons painted dark blue or black mercilessly carrying the damned to the eternal fire of Hell. By the thirteenth century, the extraordinary mosaic attributed to Coppo di Marcovaldo in the San Giovanni Baptistery in Florence - Lucifer Devouring the Damned - had given the Western imagination its most terrifying vision of the infernal.

It fell to a figure known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to impose final order on this host. Drawing on the ecstatic visions of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Enoch, and other apocalyptists, Pseudo-Dionysius systematized the Amesh-Spentas and Enoch’s Archangels into the nine orders of the Celestial Hierarchies - a scheme of a fixed universe initiated by the One as the source of Light, with subordinate Angels forming what we might call the Bureaucracy of the Divine. His definition is precise: “Hierarchy is, in my opinion, a holy order and knowledge and activity which, so far as is attainable, participates in the Divine Likeness, and is lifted up to illuminations given it from God, and correspondingly towards the imitation of God.”

Furthermore, as Umberto Eco observed, Pseudo-Dionysius contributed the idea of the Sublime Beauty of the Cosmos as the “diffusion of wisdom” - symmetry of numbers, order and proportions becoming ontological principles, as well as moral and aesthetic ones. “Theology has given to the Celestial Beings nine interpretive names,” writes Pseudo-Dionysius, “and among these our divine initiator distinguishes three threefold Orders.” Nearest to God stand “the most holy Thrones and many-eyed and many-winged ones, named in the Hebrew tongue Cherubim and Seraphim.” The second triad contains the Powers, Virtues, and Dominions. The last and lowest choirs of the Celestial Intelligences are the Angels, Archangels, and Principalities.

Each order received distinctive visual form. Isaiah’s vision of the Seraphim - “burning ones” - gave Christian art its most extraordinary celestial being: “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and His train filled the sanctuary. Above him stood the Seraphim; each had six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.” In Christian iconography, the Seraphim inflame mortals toward Divine love; they are painted in red, their three pairs of wings are red, their swords red as flame.

The Cherubim - from karabu or Kuribu, meaning “propitious, blessed” in Akkadian - are possessors of wisdom. In Ezekiel’s dream, they serve as the chariot of Yahweh: “and he rode upon a cherub and did fly: and he was seen upon the wings of the wind.” In Christian iconography, they carry a single pair of blue wings and are richly garbed as Orthodox bishops. Both Cherubim and Seraphim appear together in the magnificent mosaic of the Cathedral of Cefalu in Sicily, dating from 1148. A rare finding of seven four-winged female terracotta idols, buried at the foundation of the palace of the Assyrian King Adad-nirari III (810–783 BC), may represent early Cherubim figures; their function was apotropaic, and they were called apkallu - the seven sages.

Ezekiel also described the Thrones as wheels of fire - “their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel” - moving through a firmament the color of a “terrible crystal,” around a throne like sapphire on which God sits, suffused in the radiance of the rainbow. Some scholars have suggested that the four-faced god Marduk may have inspired this vision. Their resemblance to the winged sun, the symbol of Ahura-Mazda, is mostly evident.

The lower orders receive plainer dress. Dominions, Virtues, and Powers wear long albs, golden girdles, and green stoles, carrying golden staves in their right hands and the seal of God in their left. The lowest orders - Principalities, Archangels, and Angels - dress in soldier’s garb with golden belts and carry lance-headed javelins and hatchets.

The Archangel Michael will adorn the walls of Greek Orthodox monasteries for centuries to come. A monumental example is the seventeenth-century fresco from the monastery of Xeropotamou on Mount Athos, where Michael chains Satan in a scene of triumphant violence — the celestial bureaucrat become warrior, the hierarchy made flesh and fire.

In the next and final piece, we will turn to how individual angelic figures - Gabriel, Michael, Raphael - were depicted across the Byzantine centuries, and how artists navigated the paradox of rendering beings whose very nature transcends visual form.

During my visit to Saudi Arabia this year, I went to an exhibition of women artists (Horizon in Their Hands) in Dammam at the famous Ithra Centre. It was held at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, Dhahran, until February 2026. This exhibition’s intention was to illustrate women’s contribution to art in the Arab world. It chose works from the 1960s to the 1980s, which was a time of great social and political change in the Middle East. The artists – some fifty of them – came from North Africa, the Levant and the Gulf. The pictures captured traditional, diverse and occasionally subversive modes of expression.

Among the ones on display, the one that touched me the most was this personal, nostalgic vision by Rima Mardam Bey. In the picture, we see a young mother in a bright dress holding out a hope for the future, her baby, on a rounded balcony railing. The baby confidently reaches out for something. Is it a sunrise or a sunset in the distance? We’re not sure – I think it is the sunrise. The horizon is bright. The edge of the balcony catches the light, as do the buildings below. The light suggests optimism and hope. The buildings below are modest; this is a place for you and me, a world of ordinary people, doing everyday things.

It is an opening scene – a path, a view. Perhaps a chance for a new beginning, an escape, an opportunity. Soft palm-like leaves gently welcome the viewer. The peaceful, wistful cooing of the mourning doves accompany the baby’s happy gurgles and movements. The birds are calm. The baby’s sister protectively holds a life in her hands – another dove. She wears a white blouse and long hair – symbols of purity, innocence and youth.

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The architecture – with its high ceiling, rounded column, and curved window above the open door – suggests that this is an older house. These elements suggest tradition, continuity and the cycle of life. Birth and death are forever with us; we are but part of the larger process of love with the struggle for meaning and purpose that we all confront. This painting’s subject is eternal; it is simple, profound and universal. We understand the experience. It is familiar. It captures a female perspective.

Six months ago, The Ironist put together a video of Travelling by Coach in Saudi Arabia (please see it here), and, at the time, we feared war was coming to the Middle East. Now, of course, the bombs and killings have hit the region hard as the media continues to report destruction and death. It is sad how the outlook for those who live there and for tourism has changed so drastically.

A woman’s perspective can be different from a man’s; in a way it highlights the poignant suffering of innocent victims. Such a view is all the more important considering the surfeit of political distortions that are broadcast daily.

Rima Mardam Bey is from Damascus in Syria, one of the many countries in the Middle East that has been carelessly tossed and broken by greed and other evils. She was only one of the artists exhibited, and many of them are self-taught as they were denied formal education. A common starting point was the traditional female crafts (such as weaving and embroidery) and they have taken their craft beyond those confines to include depictions of identity and cultural ‘reclamation.’ One such artist is Nadia Mohammed, whose tapestries revolve around a vision of hard-working and contented rural life with animals and plants included. She portrays a pleasantly busy bucolic and idyllic world in the picture. It is delightfully irreverent how large the palms are!

Mona Al-Munajjed, on the other hand, makes cityscapes with batik – and adds her whimsical touch to it. In the wax-dyed fabric above, flying sheep cross the heavens of Old Jeddah. The buildings themselves have shaded windows which are vanishing in the modern world of air conditioning. These windows are called mashrabiya, and the restricted window openings provided privacy to women, reduced glare inside the house, and provided cooling with evaporative water jars. It is incredibly hot in Jeddah. The heat has not changed, yet the artist seems to wish to comment on the displacement of the old ways. Not all good things come from change. Mona, a sociologist, is primarily known for promoting women’s roles in various aspects of life. Her recent artwork - as all great art does - illustrates how art can transcend mere design to promote deeper societal messages.

I found the exhibition refreshing. I liked the recurring subjects of family and peace in the exhibition. Before this, I knew nothing of contemporary Arabic women artists. My selection reflects my interests; others would probably choose different pieces. It is interesting which works we choose. As Jonathan Tepper states in Shooting Up, “we choose our books and paintings and they make us.” We choose what we seek. I hope you get an opportunity to see these pictures – or ones like them.

Yes, there are bad people in bad neighbourhoods. Many of the early stories of the characters the reader meets turn to crime to get the money they need to buy drugs. The addicts are essentially weak, tend never to have finished school, will probably never marry, and nearly all will die young as a result of shared needles. They are all damaged. But Tepper successfully shows how they are real people with the same longings for normality and acceptance that we all have. The reward for this gruelling account comes in the form of the reader’s increasing compassion and understanding of their plight.

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When they are young, children inevitably accept their parents’ authority. As they grow, they learn more about themselves and the world around them, and learn to think for themselves. This is Shooting Up’s triumph as Tepper captures these subtle changes. By the end, the author manages to show that his family’s setbacks – and they have a big one – have still permitted the author great success. What is unique is that Tepper maps the tension between the universality of the human condition – we are all born, suffer and will die – with the particular, his and his extended family’s lives. Tepper doesn’t blow his own horn. He quotes C.S. Lewis: “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as much like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t any Narnia.” The book is a spectacular achievement. It provides a hopeful and optimistic path, and is an uplifting story of victory in the face of adversity.

What initially seem to be every-day events slowly reveal themselves to be the foundation stones for the rules for life. The boys – being boys – ignore the syringes on the ground and live for the daily soccer game. The writing is alive: you know these are real boys. They are interested in fútbol, nothing more, nothing less. This ability to focus so obsessively helps the author later in life to win scholarships…the virtue of striving: training the mind to achieve worthwhile goals. At the same time, children have an uncanny ability to save themselves, too. When they have had enough of their father’s Devotionals after dinner, they pretend to have fallen asleep. These practised skills come in handy. They show respect to dad, as they should, but also reveal that they can decide for themselves when enough is enough. Clearly, the boys have unique parents. Kids may not need money, but they do need to know right from wrong. We see that the kids may think that their parents are nuts sometimes, but they see what kindness, love, loyalty and respect will achieve.

This is not a hagiography of the father and mother. They know they have a life-long obligation to help where they can. And the cost to one of them is too much. We see they are not perfect. But they try – and continue to try. The parents remain inspirational. Yet there is no proselytizing here. We see just the facts. There is no hiding of the truth of crime to support drug habits, no hiding of back-sliding when wannabe addicts fail again and again in their attempts to break the habit. In a sense, it is a modern Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius describes how Fortune treats some better than others; that life’s gifts are often random, and to some, non-existent. You gotta take what you get – and accept it. Also, like Boethius, there is no rage against injustice. The author shows how self-analysis helps, how striving for – and demonstrating – internal excellence leads to spiritual growth. It all comes from self-choice. The book is an archetype of a self-help book but does not deserve to be read as merely a self-help handbook.

The kids meet the drug addicts. The addicts don’t want to be addicts. They want to protect the kids. They are good to the kids. The brothers pay back the trust and loyalty they witness. Meeting the addicts is the key part of the story. The addicts become alter-parents. You see the challenges facing the addicts. They try. It is this bravery that comes to the fore when the AIDS epidemic hits. It is convincing. You believe you are at the hospital beds with them; you may find yourself in tears. You can’t put the book down.

Tepper has an innate ability to show flawed characters rebuilding themselves. We see this process through the eyes of Jonathan growing up, the small reforming steps of addicts become bigger steps. The steps grow larger for them, just as they do for Jonathan growing up beside them. We see selfless acts to help others. Addicts trying to ‘make good.’ But we see warts and all. The rehab centre must repair furniture to pay its way. Tepper brilliantly illustrates how – while he is carrying a repaired sofa up the stairs to a customer, he sees that if you look carefully, the newly-prepared surface only masks the rot and woodworm beneath. The furniture is like the reformed drug addicts – they are still scarred individuals. We see that reality has nuances – we even understand why the police ignore this area of Madrid, why normal people, in fear, pull their children away from the HIV+ addicts. It is just convincing; it is real. It is, you feel, just as Jonathan Tepper saw it at the time.

Perhaps the most convincing part occurs when the author returns to America for university. Having been away so long, he doesn’t know if he is Spanish or American, as all the age-old dichotomies compound together at once – is he an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’? He was not a disadvantaged adult drug addict, but a young, privileged, and educated observer back in Spain. Now he is older than his age would indicate, surrounded by the one-dimensional wealthy Chapel Hill kids away from home for the first time. There is a great scene where a well-meaning – but unworldly-- young girl tries to warn the first-year undergraduate youth about the dangers of AIDS – and gives out little red bows. Our author, having seen the prolonged miseries ending in the death of so many of his dear friends from the ravages of this horrible disease, gets up to leave, and she comes up to him to say it is mandatory for him to learn about what it means to be HIV+…this is priceless!

I love autobiographies, and I have read many. And I can safely say that this is the best memoir I have read so far. It has a compelling story, a perspective and a point of view that changes as the character grows, the depiction of the suffering is real and believable – you are THERE at the scene as it happens and, the book allows an individual’s life to become a universal grand epic reflecting the nobility of effort to succeed against all odds.

In the end, through a life of unstinting hard work, he justly wins his long-held goal for a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Aptly, he says, achieving what he always wanted to achieve, finally gives him that ‘high’ from real achievement - rather than heroin - that he always was too frightened to admit he wanted to try. His achievement brings a smile to your face.

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?

Hamlet: Between who?

Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

(Hamlet, II, ii)

As part of The Ironist’s continuing series of articles on language and literature, on literacy for writers and readers alike, we include today one on the subject of unintentional misuse of the language with comic effect, instructional as it is, for all of us are, from time to time, inclined to make careless mistakes in writing, and it is good to be reminded of this unfortunate tendency, in an age when good proof-reading is rare, even among English teachers, as I , sadly, have seen all too often. The following examples are drawn from many sources I used in my English classes over the years, but I am heavily indebted to Richard Lederer’s fine series of books dealing with unintentional bloopers, among them Anguished English, available from good bookstores and at all public libraries. Richard Lederer was for many years himself, like me, a high-school English teacher. I have seven of his anthologies, carefully saved over the years. I used to tell my students, Say what you mean, and mean what you say. I heartily recommend them all to The Ironist’s readers. You might each like to try your hand at correcting these. In the first one below, the writer has substituted his (or her) intended word prostrate for an incorrect word.

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OOPS!

1. The girl tumbled down the stairs and lay prostitute at the bottom.

2. To be a good nurse, you must be absolutely sterile.

3. When you breathe you inspire, when you do not breathe you expire.

4. Adolescence is the stage between puberty and adultery.

5. In onion, there is great strength.

6. Louis Pasteur invented the cure for rabbis.

7. The queen sat on the thorn for 63 yrs.

8. A parent wrote: “My son is under the doctor’s care and should not take PE today. Please execute him”

9. Please excuse Gloria today She is administrating

10. Please excuse Roland from PE for a few days. Yesterday he fell out of a tree and misplaced his hip

11. Chris will not be in school because he has an acre in his side.

12. Please excuse Ray from school. He has very loose vowels

13. Please excuse Mary from being absent yesterday. She was in bed with gramps

14. Teacher, please excuse Cathy for being absent, She was sick and I had her shot.

ACCIDENTAL BLOOPERS

1. The gentleman behind me struck me on the backside, He then went to rest in a bush with his rear end showing.

2. The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.

3. The pedestrian had no idea which direction to run, so I ran over him.

4. I was unable to stop in time, and my car crashed into the other vehicle. The driver and passengers then left immediately for a vacation with injuries.

5. I was sure the old fellow would never make it to the other side of the road when I struck him.

6. I was thrown from my car as it left the road. I was later found in a ditch by some stray cows.

7. The accident happened when the right front door of a car came around the corner without giving a signal.

8. She suddenly saw me, lost her head, and we met.

9. I had been driving for about 40 years , when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident.

10. I was on my way to the doctor with rear end trouble when my universal joint gave way., causing me to have an accident.

WHOLLY HOLY BLOOPERS

1 The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind, and they can be seen in the church basement, Friday afternoon.

2 On Sunday a special collection will be taken to defray the expense of the new carpet. All those wishing to do something on the carpet will please come forward to get a piece of paper.

3 This afternoon there will be a meeting in the south and north end of the church. Children will be baptized at both ends

4 For those who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

5 The Reverend Merriwether spoke briefly, much to the delight of the audience.

6 This being Easter Sunday, we will sk Mrs White to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.

7 The choir will meet at Mrs Larson house for fun and sinning.

8 Tuesday at 5pm there will be an ice cream social. All ladies giving milk, please come early.

9 Today… Christian Youth Fellowship House Sexuality course 1pm till 8 pm. Please park in the rear parking lot for this activity

10 Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church and community

11 The 8th graders will be presenting Shakespeare’s HAMLET in the church basement on Friday at 7pm. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

12 Don’t let worry kill you off… let the church help

OTHERS

1. Dinner special Turkey $ 2.35

Chicken or beef $ 2.25

Children $ 2.00

2. For sale: antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs and large drawers.

3. Now is the chance to have your ears pierced and get an extra pair to take home.

4. Wanted: Unmarried girls to pick fresh fruit and produce at night.

5. We do not tear your clothing with machinery. We do it carefully by hand.

6. 3 yr old teacher needed for pre school.

7. Experienced preferred for needed handicapped person.

8. Our experienced Mom will care for your child. Fenced yard, meals and smacks included.

9. Mixing bowl set designed to please a cook with round bottom for efficient beating.

10. Locked in vault for 50 yrs, the owner of the jewels has decided to sell them.

11. Do not sit in chair without being fully assembled.

12. It is forbidden to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man. (sign outside a temple in Bangkok)

Zoroastrianism is not well remembered in the West, yet its theological influence on the three great monotheistic religions cannot be overstated. It arrived at a particular historical moment - after the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great had conquered Babylon and encountered the Jewish population in exile. The intellectual and religious exchange that followed was of profound mutual influence instead of domination. The Persians, whose empire was vastly more cosmopolitan than any that had preceded it, permitted their subject peoples to maintain their own religious practices. This tolerance, paradoxically, created the conditions for unprecedented theological synthesis.

The innovation of Zoroastrianism was radical. It posited the universe as a cosmic battlefield. Ahura Mazda, the supreme god or ‘Wise Lord’ was opposed by Ahriman, the destructive principle, the spirit of negation and death. This was not a universe governed by a single capricious deity whose moods shifted like the Tigris in flood season. Rather, it was one in which good and evil were locked in eternal struggle, each possessing real power, each commanding armies of spiritual beings. The mortal, in this cosmology, was not merely a victim of supernatural whim but a participant in this cosmic conflict, called to choose a side.

Ahura Mazda was served by the Amesha Spentas - the ‘Holy Immortals’, divine beings of tremendous power and distinct personality. They were agents and warriors of the divine realm, each presiding over an aspect of creation. Unlike the earlier Mesopotamian uttuku, which were often local and specific, these beings had a universal scope. They represented a systematized angelology almost like a hierarchy or a division of labor. When Judaic theologians, centuries later, would develop their own angelology in response to Persian influence, they would adopt this model. The archangel Michael, commanding God’s heavenly armies against Satan and his demons, carries the direct imprint of the Amesha Spentas and their conflict with the servants of Ahriman.

Yet the mirror image - the demonic principle - is equally important. Ahriman and his demonic hosts represented rebellion and the principle of entropy opposing the order established by the divine. This was a theology of stakes. The universe was not governed by arbitrary gods but human choice mattered because the outcome was genuinely uncertain.

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The artistic record preserves this shift with striking clarity. Consider the relief of Ahura Mazda from Persepolis, carved in the fifth century BC. The god is depicted in a pose of protective vigilance, sometimes shown protecting the sacred fire. The image radiates an intensity absent from earlier Near Eastern royal iconography. This is a god who acts, protects, and defends. The winged symbol of Ahura Mazda became one of the most enduring emblems in all of religious art, adopted and adapted by cultures from the Mediterranean to South Asia.

Against this light stood unmistakable darkness. The Assyrian demon Pazazu, carved in bronze statuettes that survive from the seventh century BC, is grotesque, demonic, winged but undeniably monstrous. Where the lamassu’s wings lifted and transcended, Pazazu’s wings suggested a violent, predatory speed. He was the demon of plague and disease, of the wind that carries contagion, the supernatural adversary that brought suffering. Pazazu was a chaotic intelligible evil.

The Sumerian goddess Lilith, whose image appears in reliefs dating to the eighteenth century BC, occupied a similar space. Originally a household spirit or demon, she gradually became associated with death and the night, a figure both feared and invoked. The evolution of her image reflects the Persian conceptual revolution. Once she was merely a local hazard, now she was death itself, opposing the forces of fertility and life.

Perhaps the most eloquent surviving artifact of Zoroastrian dualism is the silver plaque from Luristan, dated to the eighth century BC, depicting the birth of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. The composition captures the theological essence - two cosmic principles emerging simultaneously, neither superior to the other in origin, each possessing inherent reality and power. This was not a world in which evil was merely the absence of good - the later Christian formulation - but rather a world in which evil was a presence, a force, an active principle requiring constant vigilance and resistance.

The legacy of this vision cannot be contained within ancient history. When Jewish theologians, working in the Persian diaspora or under Persian imperial rule, began to systematize their own angelology, they borrowed the Persian framework. Michael as commander of God’s forces, Satan as the cosmic rebel, heaven and hell as opposed realms of spirit. The Christian tradition, inheriting Jewish theology and hellenizing it further, would elaborate this dualism into elaborate angelic hierarchies and demonic orders. Even Islam, arriving later into a region already saturated with these concepts, would incorporate Quranic angels and djinn into a universe fundamentally shaped by the Persian insight- that the cosmos is a stage whereupon good and evil wage an unending war.

We inherit this vision still. When we speak of angels and demons, when we imagine a universe divided between light and darkness, we are participating in a conversation that began on the Persian high plateaus, crystallized in relief carvings and temple inscriptions, and has echoed through three millennia of Western and Near Eastern religious thought. To understand angels is to understand how the great faiths came to imagine morality and cosmic justice. The history of the angel is the history of how humanity came to see itself as a participant in the deepest struggles of existence.

The next piece will be about how these ancient guardians and cosmic warriors transformed as they encountered Greek philosophy, Jewish mysticism, and Christian theology.

Some months ago, I read A Gentleman in Moscow during a transatlantic flight. My subsequent overseas adventure all but erased the book from my mind at the time. More recently, finding myself in an extended convalescence, I binged on the 2024 TV adaptation. Initially intending to while away virtual imprisonment in a hospital ward with mindless entertainment, I was caught up in the pleasantly charming plot.

In the opening scenes of both the book and series, a displaced Russian count stands before a Bolshevik tribunal, charged with the crime of existing too elegantly. “It is not the business of gentlemen to have occupations,” he explains, and thereby earns himself a sentence as a social parasite. The court, in a moment of revolutionary leniency, spares him the usual bullet-in-basement fate and confines him instead to Moscow’s Hotel Metropol — a palatial cage where he is to live under house arrest for the remainder of his days.

Amor Towles’s 2016 novel takes this premise and turns it into a study in civility under siege. The real Moscow Metropol, built in 1905 in opulent Art Nouveau style, stood through the convulsions of the twentieth century as both a monument to a vanished order and a convenient way of containing foreign diplomats and journalists. Towles transforms it into a terrarium of lost civilisation — a place where the manners of the ancient regime survive the Terror and where one toasts the end of history with a glass of Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

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The novel is graceful, witty, and safe — this is a chamber piece rather than a symphony. It is not really a Russian story but a Western morality play — resilience, adaptation, the meaning of community — papered over with a thin veneer of Russian culture and history. The Bolshevik Revolution and the reign of Joseph Stalin are merely the background décor. The themes are often predictable, and our protagonist is blessed with plot armour thick enough to withstand a blast from a T-34 tank. Still, the book moves with charm and confidence; the prose, like the Count’s manners, never falters.

What distinguishes A Gentleman in Moscow from the usual parade of historical redemption tales is its refusal to humiliate its aristocratic hero for his old-world values. In lesser fiction, the fallen nobleman is chastened, stripped of privilege, and reborn as a cliché of proletarian virtue. Count Rostov, by contrast, remains entirely himself. His dignity, formality, and sense of lineage become his means of survival — not in defiance of change, but as a mode of grace within it. He does not evolve so much as endure, and endurance, here, is the point. As his waiter notes in the first episode, this is a character who “refuses to be beaten”.

Towles understands that civility can be a weapon. In a century that made effusive humility fashionable, Rostov’s old-world pride feels almost radical. He is a man who holds to the rigours of wine pairings and proper table etiquette while the world outside is reduced to bread queues and slogans. Rather than being stripped away, his civility becomes an act of quiet defiance against the utilitarian vulgarity of the age. His humanity is not in spite of his privilege, but because of it.

The television adaptation preserves this spirit, if not always its subtlety. Visually, it is sumptuous: a sepia-lit Art Nouveau ballet of mahogany and polished brass, with Ewan McGregor delivering just enough melancholy charm to make one forgive the occasional historical blunder and the script’s tendency toward aphorism. The supporting cast performs ably, though the production’s gestures toward inclusivity feel more than a little anachronistic — one suspects the Bolsheviks would have been less enthusiastic about equity hiring than Paramount+.

But this is easily overlooked. Both works succeed on their own terms: as meditations on grace, memory, and the refusal to let barbarism set the tone. The Count’s world shrinks to the confines of the hotel, but within these, he maintains a whole civilisation. In an age allergic to hierarchy and privilege, it reminds us that the nobility of spirit can wear a dinner jacket and know which fork to use.

A Gentleman in Moscow lacks the profundity of the great works of Russian literature it often references, but it offers something equally rare these days: a vision of refinement unembarrassed by itself. In a time when every institution is crumbling and taste is treated with a degree of guilt, the Count reminds us that one may still dine correctly, speak with dignity, and refuse to lose one’s humanity even at the end of the world.

The philosophical genealogy begins, as so much does, with Plato. In the Phaedrus, he writes with characteristic boldness about the soul’s ascent: “The function of the wing is to take what is heavy and raise it up into the region above, where the gods dwell; of all things connected with the body, it has the greatest affinity with the divine.”

«Πέφυκεν ή πτερού δύναμις το εμβριθές άγειν άνω μετεωρίζουσα ή το των θεών γένος οικεί, κεκοινώνηκέ δε πή μάλιστα των περί το σώμα του θείου ψυχή, το δε θείον καλόν, σοφόν, αγαθόν και πάν ότι τοιούτον»

For Plato, the wing was a mechanism of transcendence, the material fact by which mortal consciousness could touch the divine. Yet Plato understood that gods did not harangue mankind directly. Between the divine throne and the human petitioner stood intermediaries: daemons, as he called them, beings of a different order entirely. “The immortal is eternal and deathless and ageless,” he notes, “but the mortal is always perishing and changing.” These daemons occupied the space between the two.

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The concept of a personal guardian spirit, that is, a being assigned to shepherd the individual through a hostile cosmos, originates not in Greece but in ancient Mesopotamia. An Akkadian inscription from the second millennium BC captures the anxiety behind this theology with startling plainness: “He who has no god or a guardian angel when he walks in the street wears a headache like a garment.” The image is visceral: to walk unprotected through the city, through the unpredictable world, is to bear an invisible burden, a chronic malaise of the spirit.

The scholar Thorkild Jacobsen has argued persuasively that this theology emerged from genuine fear. The Sumerians and Akkadians inhabited a world they experienced as saturated with supernatural hostility. Demons prowled the streets at dusk. Capricious deities demanded appeasement. The natural world - the river that flooded, the sun that burned, the wind that howled - seemed animated by malevolent intention. In response, they cultivated the concept of a personal deity, a god assigned to one’s particular household or body, whose chief function was to protect the people. These guardians were called uttuku, and they were divided into categories: the benevolent shedu (male) and lamassu (female) served as protectors, whereas other uttuku harbored hostile intent.

The lamassu is particularly central to our visual history. In the imagination of the ancient Assyrians, she was winged - a hybrid creature combining the head of a woman with the body of an anthropomorphic bull, often horned and majestic. Yet this iconic form did not emerge fully realized. The Sumerians, the cultural ancestors and linguistic precursors of the Assyrians, carved recumbent anthropomorphic bulls with horned tiaras into the temples of Girsu around 2150 BC. These creatures bore no wings. They were terrestrial guardians, bound to the threshold, their power residing in their massive weight and their fixed watchfulness.

The transformation from wingless bull to winged hybrid reveals a conceptual evolution. Wings, in this context, signify the capacity to transcend material limitation and to move between worlds. As populations merged and empires absorbed the religious iconography of their predecessors, the figure of the guardian evolved to accommodate new philosophical demands. By the time the Neo-Assyrian King Sargon II commissioned his palace at Korsabad in the early eighth century BC, the colossal lamassu - now magnificently winged and carved from single blocks of limestone standing over twelve feet—had become the preeminent emblem of divine protection and imperial power.

The palace reliefs of Assurnazirpal II, Sargon’s predecessor, depict these winged deities in a new context: they pollinate the Tree of Life, participating in a cosmic regeneration. Here we encounter perhaps the earliest systematic depiction of winged guardian figures in something approaching human form - beings who are neither gods nor demons, but intermediaries, facilitators of divine will. Instead of ruling and commanding, they tend and enable.

This iconographic tradition, refined through conquest and cultural synthesis, traveled far beyond the walls of Assyrian palaces. It infiltrated the visual culture of surrounding empires and religions. When we examine the question of how angels came to look as they do, we are tracing a thread that leads back to the moment when a Sumerian sculptor decided that a bull, guardian and fixed, needed wings to communicate across the growing distance between earth and heaven.

The theological and artistic foundations were now laid. But the story grows far more complex when another civilization’s spiritual sophistication enters the arena: Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion, would prove decisive in transforming these local guardian figures into the systematized angelology that would shape Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. That transition from protective spirit to cosmic combatant in an eternal struggle between good and evil is where our investigation will turn next.

Stay tuned for the next piece that will expand on the dualism that would reshape Western theology.

It is said that Zeus, the great philanderer, lay with Mnemosyne (Memory), a Titan, for a marathon nine-day, ‘sexathon’ on top of Mt. Parnassos. The Titans were colossal, and this romp must have been exhausting. In due course, she bore nine daughters – the Muses. These daughters were the goddesses of literature, science, and the arts, representing divine creativity. When you invoke them, they whisper inspiration in your ears. The Greeks integrated memory with history and cultural identity. Poets and orators combined education with the power of imagination.

Mt. Parnassos is not only massive, but it seemed to become magical and mythic as I drove around it. Some think the name itself comes from the Luwians, the shadowy antecedents of the Trojans. Zeus was purported to have declared it the centre of the world. Such was its imaginative power that students in the 17th century called part of the Left Bank in Paris ‘Montparnasse.’

The Greeks believed that imagination, tradition and analysis should play a large part in their lives. Today we may have too many ephemeral thirty-second reels and social media posts, rendering our culture excessively banal and eliminating the need for thinking. There is a tendency to regard only the ‘new’ as worthwhile. Too many seek instant gratification and too few seek self-reflection.

In contrast, the contemporary audience of Aeschylus’ Oresteia would have known the story of Agamemnon’s murder by his wife Clytemnestra. In that story of the wooden horse, the priests said Agamemnon had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia before he could sail for Troy. Such an act raises the moral imperative – can you kill your own daughter for a greater purpose? The audience weighs the culpability of Agamemnon, who had to choose between differing requirements – those of kingship, family, religion, moral and personal pride. Agamemnon was damned no matter what action he took. Ironically, the great king had become a pawn.

All the characters in the play endure the consequences of their actions; even the innocent suffer. Like life itself, there is a universality to the inevitability of submitting to forces beyond our control. Iphigeina, whose name ironically means “Strongly-Born,” obediently submits to her sacrifice at Aulis, her warm blood running over the cold stone of the altar. Thus, imagination aids our understanding of the hard world around us. Even the ‘happy’ ending of the play offers no redemption – there is now ‘Law’, no longer merely ‘Vengeance’ – but the audience knows that there are inadequacies in the Law when a Tyrant rules...

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I drove down from Mt. Parnassos through the Brallos Pass with a profound sense that much of our modern world has lost the awareness of moral complexity. Things aren’t black and white. When we think, we see that most things have shades of grey – and that is what makes it hard for us to choose. And we are wiser for seeing the shades of grey.

There was a rising morning mist and a light rain falling that day. Intermittent views of soaring mountains and deep valleys appeared and disappeared in spectacular randomness. It felt as though nature was sentient; watching. The narrow road twisted, turned, rose, fell and swept down to the sea. I loved using the gears of my little Fiat, the engine singing as it worked up the inclines and braked bravely on the declines. It was fun – and the Muses had kindly cleared the road of traffic.

In places I could see concrete footings of a future, bland, four-lane highway. I am sure there will be some great architectural, sweeping bridges. (In Europe, unlike so much of North America, they do spend money on good design). But it will be sad to see the two-lane road gone. Is life worth living if we have everything simplified for us?

Or is it that, perhaps,many want an anaesthetized life? Surely the ruling class prefers a less demanding electorate? Maybe this is why we get the governments we deserve. Continuing that idea, perhaps boring lives lead to the popularity of extreme sports? Possibly we are coddled to avoid challenges. Why exert or learn if a handheld AI-controlled telephone provides the answers? Is there a danger we could become the Eloi of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine? The Eloi lived a life without cares, but were raised to be eaten by the Morlocks. If so, what a future we have.

Certainly, as the little engine in my Fiat struggled on inclines, I had to double de-clutch and heel-and-toe to try and maintain a constant speed. These days, most cars are automatics, and the fun of a manual transmission has been lost. No ‘virtual’ computer game is as thrilling as go-karting in an empty parking lot…our lives are indeed drugged with gimmicks of induced indolence.

I stopped in Brallos. Exactly 85 years ago to the day in 1941, Australian and New Zealand battalions fought a fighting retreat here from advancing Germans. Back then, trucks had no synchromesh and no air conditioning – let alone power brakes and steering. I felt for the farmers from the flatlands Down Under who had to fight the German mountain battalion that had trained in the Austrian Alps.

A military cemetery caught my attention – but it was from another war. In WWI, the 49th Stationary Hospital was established beneath Mt. Parnassos for soldiers of the Gallipoli campaign. It had an impressive view of the mountains, and was quiet and beautifully maintained. Many graves were from 1919. Perhaps some of the patients lingered here with war injuries before being carried off by influenza. How far from home they are buried. Seven were from the Labour Corp, Russians continuing to fight for the Allies after the Bolsheviks pulled out of the war. I was touched by Sapper R.H. Gibbons’ epitaph: “A noble death. Far from friends and family. Death divides but memories cling.” I wonder if those were his thoughts as he slipped away. It was tragic. Imagine losing a son or father. The loss for those people is no less from being so long ago.

I think for many of us the years have allowed us to reconsider the irrecoverable cost of WWI. The mindless wastage of young lives. Do we really need to fight so many wars? Have you noticed that the proponents of war avoid discussing the cost of a war?

It is only twenty miles to one of the most famous battlefields in recorded history – the stand of King Leonidas and his Spartans, Thespians and Thebans against the Persians at Thermopylae. Greatly outnumbered, the Greeks fought to the death, hacked by swords and skewered with arrows. The Persian King of Kings, Xerxes the Great, was a megalomaniac who had famously lashed, branded and shackled the sea after his pontoon bridge across the Hellespont had been destroyed in a storm. That was a delightfully extravagant act of hubris.

Although it may seem these battles and wars are far away and long ago, new wars loom over us now. As Wilfred Owen says of Horace’s Ode, ‘the eternal lie’ is yet repeated, dulce et decorum est pro patri mori (it is noble and just to die on behalf of your native land). We need to remember the cost of war, to analyze the consequences, employing our imagination and our memory. Most of the time, wars are fought for greed, and achieve nothing – except death and destruction.

Writing is hard work: it has been said to consist of “1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.” Many would-be writers of everything from a nephew’s thank-you note to a doting aunt for her birthday present to a harried graduate student with a delayed doctoral thesis, inevitably learn that every act in the laborious process of writing requires careful planning and thought if it is to be successful in conveying in a timely fashion what needs to be said. It must be fluent, convincing, sufficiently serious, and free from a host of common writing errors recalled from bygone English classes. There are countless authorities, pamphlets, handbooks of usage, and the like to help us write better by hard work, but there is very little we can do to acquire inspiration, without which we will remaåin stuck in neutral until we abandon the effort in frustration. Inspiration is a crucial ingredient in effective writing, but how are we to come by it?

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Charles Lamb, the Victorian essayist, antiquarian, and poet, considered it “foolish to suppose” that alcohol was or ever could be an aid to inspiration, according to novelist Peter Ackroyd, who adds, “He knew that it constrained his imagination, confining it to the layers of drunken perception.”

To those who choose not to drink it, this seems so obvious as hardly to need saying, but the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who took laudanum, a similarly addictive stimulant then prescribed as a painkiller, was awoken from a drug-induced dream by a loud knock from someone who had come to see him on business. Once this caller had left, Coleridge sat down at his desk and feverishly attempted to describe the exotic dream vision set in “Xanadu” where a “sacred river ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea” that the caller had interrupted, but it was by then too late, as the dream had fled, the poet tells us, “passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” All we have of his experience is the intriguing poetic fragment, a mere 54 lines, of the unfinished poem “Kubla Khan.” Suffice it to say that all addictive substances can be quickly eliminated as vehicles for creative inspiration, as this faculty cannot be summoned, if at all, in such a crude way. It comes unexpectedly, at any time, while we are riding the bus or taking a shower, shifting snow, listening to music, during a phone call, or at any time when the mind is apparently idle and miles away from the discipline of composition. In its refusal to be compelled, inspiration is similar to mercy, whose quality, as Portia insists in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, “is not strained ( forced)/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”

If we have been lucky, we each might have been inspired by the example of someone whose influence we recall with fondness years later. Teachers are sometimes great sources of inspiration. I have been fortunate to have had three of them: all teachers of English, one in Venezuela, a second in England, and the third here in Ottawa. All three may well have been unaware of the lasting effects their interest in and encouragement of my work had on me, although I suspect not, and if the writer Penelope Lively, a shrewd judge of human nature, is correct, the effects of inspiration came about as a result of what she has called “some mysterious process of free association.” It is mysterious because we do not understand its origins. In Christian belief, ‘inspiration’ is a gift from the Holy ‘Spirit’, both words derived from the Latin spiro -- I breathe-- so that an inspired artist has been ‘breathed into’ by a force not subject to human, or chemical, control. No wonder, then, that there is no handbook for an ‘aspiring’ writer, one who wants to ‘breathe in’ better. Inspiration comes, if it comes at all, in unexpected ways, often at times when the mind is otherwise engaged. A case in point is that of Margaret Laurence, the Canadian author of The Stone Angel, whose main character, Hagar, she has told us, was the “old woman who walked into my kitchen” one morning while she was occupied with something else. Entering a writer’s kitchen is an unusual thing for a fictional character to do, but it is of a piece with the way in which imagination, the engine of all human discovery, works as the handmaiden of inspiration, and there is no reason to doubt that ‘unreality’ imposed itself on reality in just such a fashion, whether or not the Holy Spirit was responsible for sending Hagar to her.

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, creator of works of mythopoeic and epic fantasy read by millions around the world, was also a University of Oxford scholar who was marking student examination papers as part of his duties. While he was busy with his evaluations, he suddenly felt impelled to write down on a piece of paper, the following words: “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit.” At the time, Professor Tolkien confessed, he did not know why he wrote this, or what a hobbit was, so he had to keep on writing to find out. Similarly, when some hobbits arrive in Bree on their mission to Mount Doom, there is a mystery man in the hostelry where they are staying, whose identity Tolkien confessed he did not then know, but was able to discover as the story unfolded: this person was to be revealed to him, and then to us, as ‘Strider,’ whose true identity and importance become clear much later.

C.S. Lewis, a friend of Tolkien’s, and author of the Narnia books for children, revealed that years before he set pen to paper, he had had for no obvious reason, “a mental picture of a faun with an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood,” a striking image that was to be the prelude to a series of adventures that several children who emerge from a wardrobe into the land of Narnia are to have together, beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and ending six subsequent novels later with The Last Battle.

A story I wrote several years ago called “Her Finest Hour” was based loosely on a real girl’s apprenticeship in a pretentious department store in pre-war England. I knew the ‘plot,’ and how to describe the steps that would lead to the girl’s decision to leave her employment, but for some reason I could not think of how to get the story started, until an image flashed into my mind unbidden as I lay half- awake in bed one morning. It was the image of a young man walking gingerly along the hard sand of a beach, careful not to wet his shiny new shoes in the gentle wavelets that lapped the shore. I had no idea who he was. The sky and sea were grey, so it must have been an English shoreline. He was, I thought, taking a short cut to work, as why else would he risk damaging his shoes with salt water? On the face of it, this image, which I used to begin the narrative, exactly as I recalled it, had nothing to do with the girl--unless they met at the beach, and a romantic interest resulted. That would work! I began the story eagerly, and was pleased with the result, but then I had help with it, didn’t I?

Another of my stories was initially sparked by the 1880 American hymn ‘Softly and Tenderly’ that I first heard at the opening and closing of the moving 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful. The hymn’s soulful lyrics, sung beautifully by Cynthia Clawson, impressed themselves so deeply on my mind at the time that they eventually, years later, became the inspiration for my story ‘Home,’ a meditation on the nature of homecoming that I began writing in 2015, and have revised five times since then, most recently, this morning. The hymn’s composer, Will Lamartine Thompson, confided that he would always write down words or melodies that came to him “at odd times” if he deemed them worthy of a song, “no matter where I am, at home or hotel, at the store or travelling.” Such extraordinary interventions by the creative spirit are, I suspect, more common than we realize, but they come when they will; we cannot make them appear, nor is there a guarantee that we will make anything of them. But when they arrive and lodge themselves in our memories, writers should be grateful. I certainly am for mine.

What’s his secret? Gould is intriguing. It’s June of ‘68, and Glenn is a happy man. That silly cap sits on his head, balancing his glasses in the heat.

“Well, of course, they’re moving here,” he said, driving Longfellow, his Lincoln, to Muskoka with Lukas Foss.

An awkward silence. That triangle silence.

“Lakes will appear in the blue mountains,” he said as he drove. Lukas didn’t believe any of it, but the children loved it.

“You are the greatest pianist in the world,” said Lukas, back in 1958.

“And you are the greatest composer in the world,” said Glenn.

How things have changed.

“It was a very straight-forward triangle,” said Cornelia, Lukas’ wife, Glenn’s lover. “There really was no great mystery to it. Of course, we had something of a family, with Glenn, you know, as … not a father figure, but as a member of the family.”

“Glenn, there are half a dozen impresarios dying to get you to play.”

“Well, that’s not a very enticing proposition,” he said. “I think it is hideous. I feel like I will be standing on stage, stark naked.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes, audiences, not individually, of course, but collectively, are a force of evil. They are despicable.”

“Really?”

“Yes, but the fruit of our work in the recording studio is not some sort of autocratic thing. It’s a product we can create, a beautiful recording for – no, a kit for someone to rewrite.”

“Oh really?”

“I will sit in the Eaton Auditorium,” he said. “Lorne will record me.”

“And I will be your arms and legs,” said Ray Roberts, his personal assistant. “I will help you to do the things you don’t like while you play in this little studio we have.”

“Are you really a control freak?” asked the reporter.

“Freak?” said Glenn, almost singing. “What a word!” he said with a twinkle. “Let me write you the script before we go on.”

“Can we please talk about the stool?” said the reporter.

“Do not speak ill of a member of ze family. It is a boon, a travelling companion,” Glenn said in his German conductor voice.

Cornelia, suffocating, said, “Well, the eccentricities became more and more important. And, of course, Lukas had no interest in me at the time. He had his public but Glenn. Well, there were more and more people who loved him, but his paranoia made him more and more difficult. He was taking these anxiety pills and anti-depressants. Nobody knows what this means. His personality was changing. There is less and less of Glenn and more of somebody else emerging.”

“Who was emerging?”

The painter turned her head, a gesture of the unknowable.

“Life is not easy for him,” said Glenn, chatting into the phone.

“Who is this?” said the voice on the other side.

“It’s Glenn,” said Glenn.

“Bugger off,” he said.

“But I want you back,” said Glenn.

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Cornelia looked into the vanishing point. “Lukas was charming and the children were clearly on the side of the father and not the avuncular “uncle.” I decided to leave, and that was the right thing, because … he was forsaking us.”

“We are all shy, and so we cannot talk,” said little Eliza.

“Well, yes, but you are not to be documented, Lenore.” She had a place in Wainscott in Long Island and Glenn came. He was wearing his gloves, his coat, and his hat and it was the middle of summer, and he was very distraught.”

“I feel not at all well,” said Lenore. Glenn hung up the phone. He sat at the phone table and took his blood pressure. “I’m actually ill,” he said.

He was in his car, travelling, and visited a doctor. “Doc, I need some pills. I can’t sleep.”

“Do you want to sleep?”

“No!” he said sharply. “I cannot sleep. Night is creativity. But there’s a hospital full of germs. Mother is dying you see, and I need to call her. But why? What is wrong with me? These germs, although they are there, are not all meant for me. I failed her. Poor Mouse. She died alone and there was me, Spaniel, lapping and wondering about her. I’m nocturnal. My moods are inversely related to the brightness of the sky. I’m like the bats and the racoons. There I am listening to Roslana Rozak singing something by Lukas Foss. I called her. I felt we needed to work together.”

“And did you?”

“Hm? Roxy is something,” said Glenn.

“We rehearsed in his apartment and watched the program, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” said Roxy. “And then we would work. He wanted a puppy farm in Manitoulin.”

“But there are the cows, and Roxy is singing. Or is she? No, that is me, and the elephant is yelling at my German accent,” said Glenn.

“Nay, that is Myron Chianti, and he messed up the words.” He paused. “These, you see, are the happiest days of my life. I can make myself happy within twenty minutes.”

Glenn sat at the piano, playing the Goldbergs. But he was a crazy man playing. Tired, wired. “He had begun to resemble Mr. Dress-up,” says Eliza.

At the piano. A twisted eccentric. Writing the numbers. His glasses magnifying the keys.

“… and the notes as imagined by me were popping into the recording and nowhere else. He opened a letter and the world said ‘Thank you Mr. Glenn. You saved my life.’”

Called Ray in the middle of the night, a day after his fiftieth birthday.

Glenn had a stroke. Something was wrong, but he stayed in the hotel. His birthday had been on a Sunday. His stroke was on Monday.

“He was fifty. Just fifty.”

He was frantic and agitated. “Nobody is helping. Why is nobody helping? I have things to do,” he croaked. “Help me,” he said sliding out of his body into that coma.

It was 1982 and the roses piled up outside Fran’s on St. Clair.

The door had shut and Glenn Gould’s puppy farm was now nothing but a dream.

His Goldbergs were his misbegotten twins.

He was odd. His gloves had fingers now. That coat worked. He told me he was going to die when he was fifty. I’d hoped he was wrong.

The largest church in Toronto is St. Paul’s Anglican Church. It was jammed to the doors.

The king had died. But he wasn’t done. Silence in the church as someone started singing.

It was Glenn. The aria from the Goldberg Variations. When it finished, Bach said it best.

“Goodbye Glenn,” he said. But it also said, “that is what he was about.”

No, that was not it. He walked alone. He sang. I believe he was only at home when he was actually playing.

Why? Well, really, that is true of all of us. The world will be a better place. But he knew the mind of Bach, that world none of us can really know. He was a mathematician at the keyboard. He worked the numbers. They added up, and he made them perfect.

About the writer: Alexander Montgomery (A.R. Montgomery)

An author, poet, composer, and pianist working out of Toronto, Canada, Alexander is a long-time traveller, he lives by the maxim, “I hate travelling, but I like being elsewhere.” Born in France and educated in Canada and the U.S., he has lived in France, Canada, the United States, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. A prolific ghostwriter, he has published over 160 romance novels in almost every genre. His poetry and short stories can be found in many Canadian and American journals including Otherwise Engaged and Syncopation Literary journals. He is an avid chef and a great lover of political discourse.

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”

I just finished watching the newest season of Bridgerton and like any reasonably conditioned reader of Victorian romances, I was naturally reminded of the archetype that shaped my womanhood. Yes, I’m talking about Pride and Prejudice.

There is, of course, Mr. Darcy. There is always Mr. Darcy. The timelessness of his charm and chivalry, his awkward nobility and love made millions and billions of women’s hearts flutter across generations. But to reduce Austen to Darcy is unfair.

Because we have the brilliant Elizabeth Bennett. Witty, observant, and ruthlessly precise.

Slightly better than throwing a brick at him.

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And then there are the sisters. Such a well-written bunch that your heart spoke for each and your thirsty reader mind wanted to know the HEAs (happily ever afters) of each of their lives. Where Jane was generous, Lydia was reckless. Kitty impressionable and Mary the misfit duckling of the lot. But right at the beginning of the novel, unnoticed by most, Mary says something profound (and a bit preachy, I must admit)-

Now, most readers of Pride and Prejudice remember Mary Bennett as the middle of the five Bennett sisters and the plain awkward one, the only one who is not considered pretty. Perhaps partly because of this, she cultivates a reputation for learning and seriousness, reading extensively, making moral pronouncements, and acting pedantic by quoting from philosophical texts. She also fancies herself a musician and singer, though Austen makes it clear that she has more enthusiasm than talent. We all remember that painful scene at the Netherfield ball where Mr. Bennet has to signal her to stop performing.

According to A Memoir of Jane Austen, Mary married one of her Uncle Philips’s law clerks and moved into Meryton with him. Janice Hadlow writes about this sister in her novel The Other Bennet Sister, giving Mary an interiority as she steps out of the margins.

An ardent fan of fictional worlds, I enjoyed revisiting familiar Austen territory in the first half of the book, but this time through Mary’s acute self-awareness. We see the same dances and Longbourne drawing rooms, but now through self-conscious Mary who is bookish, gauche, and painfully overlooked. Always speaking a little too much and trying really hard to belong.

What I loved most about this perspective though is that it isn’t just a rewrite of Pride and Prejudice. Hadlow (former BBC executive) extends the story to include what happens once her sisters are settled. The fact that she is sandwiched between two pairs of sisters – Jane and Elizabeth are close, and Kitty and Lydia are close – leaves her isolated. This is perhaps where her bookishness and moralizing tendencies come from - in a bid to carve out a niche when she cannot compete on social charm or physical beauty.

Just when Mary is left without property and fortune, an invitation from Charlotte Collins draws her back to her childhood home. After a few false starts, we see her slow-burn growth, as she finds love and acceptance in Aunt Gardiner’s house in London where her self-worth and confidence slowly start growing. In one of these deeply satisfying scenes, we see her eventually attracting the attention of two suitors and turning the tables on Caroline Bingley.

Fans of Longbourne (P&P from the servants’ POV) and Wide Sargasso Sea (bringing Jane Eyre’s madwoman to the fore) would find much to appreciate here. Even as Bridgerton is trying to expand the Austen-era lens in its fourth season to bring up invisible characters to the fore, I found this book did a decent job of elevating the side character into a strong intelligent heroine in her own right. In The Other Bennett Sister, the author cuts past romance to something more difficult —

“The most important habit to conquer was the habit of misery itself. Nothing was so inimical to happiness as the settled conviction it was not for her. It was a conviction that ran very deep in her; but she knew she must fight to rise above it.”

“…There are times when happiness must be fought for, if we are to have any chance at all of achieving it.”

I didn’t think I would actually get invested in Mary but I found that the more I read, the more it went beyond being just a classic retelling or mere fan fiction. If you love stories about underestimated characters finding their footing, you will find this one quite moving and it might even just send you back to P&P for a fresh reread. Among all the things in the book, what stayed with me most was –

Arsinoe took longer each day to return from her herb-gathering and she ventured further and further into the open countryside and the vineyards. She knew that these pilgrimages took place every four years, starting with a procession from the Temple of Artemis at Brauron in the Acropolis of Athens to the sanctuary at Brauron, and back again to Athens.

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One late summer afternoon, after her participation in the mysteries of the Goddess, she decided to stay out in the fields, and join a poor family of pilgrims who were going to the Temple of Artemis at Brauron in Athens.

Arsinoe thought that she would be safer if she followed them at a distance. Eventually, after a week’s hardship of hunger and sleeping in the open countryside, Arsinoe arrived at the great city of Athens, to be dazzled by the beautiful temples on the Acropolis hill.

At the same time, she was confused by so many people milling about that she did not know where to turn. After a moment’s hesitation, she tugged at the sleeve of an old lady who was selling pottery carrying it in a basket and asked the way to the potters’ quarters in the city. The old lady, seeing Arsinoe’s state of hunger, offered her a piece of bread and cheese and then took her by the hand and led her to the outskirts of Athens. As it happened, she was the mother of a famous young sculptor, who was very devoted to his mother. Arsinoe was surprised to find a large marble statue, chiseled in honor of the old lady, exposed in the courtyard of their house! But Arsinoe would have more surprises!

When Arsinoe mentioned the name of her father, no one seemed to know his whereabouts. Eventually, she found out that her father had left Athens and taken a boat to Miletus, a very prosperous city on the Ionian coast.

In the beginning, she thought of joining him, but the poor girl did not have any money to pay her fare. So, Arsinoe offered her services to the old lady to help with selling her wares to keep herself from starvation.

She was so good at singing the merits of the pots and vases that she attracted numerous customers and the old lady was more than pleased to have Arsinoe as her helper.

Arsinoe, then, stayed with the old lady and her son for a year. She also applied herself to pottery, learning the trade of her father. The young sculptor taught her how to knead and prepare the clay, how to turn the potter’s wheel, and most of all, how to bake and glaze her pottery in a big kiln at the back of the house. Arsinoe was happy for a while and her melodious singing filled the neighborhood!

One day, as she was singing her wares at the marketplace, a man stopped to listen to her. He was so bewitched by her voice, that he asked her, where she had learned to sing so beautifully. Did she know how to play the double flute, as well?

Arsinoe was taken aback and a bit afraid to share her secret, but then seeing that the man did not mean any harm, she told him of her training at the Brauron Sanctuary.

Next day, the man appeared in the market place accompanied by a beautiful lady. They asked Arsinoe, if she wanted to come and stay with them and become a musician. She only had to sing and play the flute to the guests at the banquets. She would earn more money than selling pots and pans in the market place. Arsinoe considered their offer for a while and then accepted it.

From then on, Arsinoe became very famous for her beauty, charm and talents. Many people sought her out to entertain their guests at feasts and in no time, she became very prosperous.

Arsinoe was not ungrateful to the old lady and her sculptor son, and she often visited them with gifts of fruits and sweets. She had introduced a dance in a peplum, which created lovely folds around the body, and asked her sculptor friend if he wanted to make a statue of her. So, they started an enterprise and both of them began to create little terracotta figurines of dancers, and ladies wrapped in mantles with hats and fans. And thus, they became the famous Tanagra idols!

Editorial Note

Thus concludes our serialized tale of Arsinoe—a story that reveals itself as a creation myth for one of the ancient world’s most beloved artistic traditions. The Tanagra figurines that Arsinoe and her collaborators produce within the narrative are, of course, real historical artifacts. Excavated in the necropolis near the village of Tanagra in the late nineteenth century, these terracotta figures genuinely date from the Hellenistic period (approximately fourth to first centuries BCE) and represent a remarkable tradition of small-scale domestic sculpture.