Frustula Augustiniana

  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. 

Starting September 29 and running to the end of November TO SIGN UP, send me an email. First come, first served.  Course length: 8 weeks Cost: $250 Intermediate Conversational Latin (3 hrs/week)  MWF 7-8pm EST This is a course designed to give students practice speaking. I keep the number to five participants. 

I started this essay a while ago, with no idea what time had in store for me. I might work on it more, but I figured, despite its shagginess, it'll do for now.  Quousque* is one of those Latin words that, even now, you find popping up in rather unexpected places. Most recently, I saw Quousque tandem abutere  used to title a dance . For me, the quousque came today. I've been making cheese and I loved it, but my body has said "enough." I'm hurting all over, so I'm passing the creamery on to someone else. I'll continue making things. Maybe I'll return to teaching in a classroom. Who knows?  When is the quousque for a cheese? I found that the only way to know was, as the saying in the profession has it, to "always be tasting." You know the window of time that a cheese wants based on how you've handled it in the vat, how much or little moisture you let it keep, how big or small the curd, to what temp you took them, whether you "cooked...