Frustula Augustiniana

Breve tempus vitae. Sed modo ambula ex fide, mores compone. Longe in alto est ille: nutri pennas. Crede quod nondum potes videre, ut merearis videre quod credis. Tanquam peregrini vivamus, transire nos cogitemus; et minus peccabimus. Agamus potius Domino Deo nostro gratias, quia huius vitae ultimum diem et brevem esse voluit et incertum. A prima infantia usque ad decrepitam senectutem breve spatium est. Qui tamdiu vixerat, quid ei profuisset si Adam hodie mortuus esset? Quid diu est, ubi finis est? Hesternum diem nemo revocat: hodiernus a crastino urgetur, ut transeat. Ipso parvo spatio bene vivamus, et illo eamus, unde non transeamus. Et modo cum loquimur utique transimus. Verba currunt, ex ore volant: sic actus nostri, sic honores nostri, sic miseria nostra, sic ista felicitas nostra. Totum transit: sed non expavescamus; Verbum Domini manet in aeternum (Isai. XL, 8).

 Courses for February and March

  Thanksgiving was too late. Too late for what I wanted. No leaves singing laughter still aflutter wind-kissed against the sky and blushing waving bye to migrant birds above but somersaulted to dark beds below where drained of color, crushed, crumpled they lie and wait for emptying’s reward of being taken in God’s store of wet and sturdy ground where ground to time they up again will rise through vaulting pores and veins to be greeted in some spring by birds returned and the over-joyed weeping of the skies. So wait. Wait on the wood leafless and nude like Adam and Eve before they fell. Wait for them awakening.

Meaning is the  sine qua non  of language. It may be surprising, then, that scientists currently lack a complete theory of meaning,  and that semantics remains a kind of "Wild West" of linguistic theory. Even more than syntax, semantics is full of rival approaches, and continued disagreement prevails, even about the basic question of what meaning is, or how it is to be defined. That such questions have remained in the domain of philosophy since the time of Aristotle is a testament to their difficulty: meaning can still be seen as the most important unsolved problem in the cognitive sciences.  W. Tecumseh Fitch.  THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE . (Cambridge University Press, 2010). p. 119.

Courses from December through January

I have selected Nature Writing for my vocation because at this time in my life it appeals to me more than any other subject. I feel it is my duty to do what I can to make people realize that the wild creature has just as much right to live as you or I. They must learn that the wild offers a more thrilling sport than killing — that of letting live. Killing for the excitement of killing is murder. As in human life, there is tragedy, and humor, and pathos; in the life of the wild, there are facts of tremendous interest, real lives, and real happenings, to be written about, and there is little necessity for drawing on the imagination." —14-year-old Loren Eiseley , 1921, from an 8th-grade essay entitled Nature Writing . From The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley . ed. Kenneth Heuer . (Little, Brown & Company, 1987). p. 14.