The Ironist
Differing Perspectives
The Angel of the Archive: The Philosopher Who Forgot What He Believed
In the Angel of the Archive series by Jonathan Bennett, this one is about a footnote that baffled generations. In 1723, a minor German philosopher named Johann Andreas Grüber published a dense metaphysical and epistemological treatise entitled De Tenebris Rationis...
Say Not, “the Struggle Nought Availeth.”
The new year is here... As the year turns, I find myself thinking about what we carry forward and what truly matters. The grand sweep of The Lord of the Rings enthralled me in high school. I had read it two or three times by the time I reached university. It was the...
Seeking the BetterLife™: Exercise Choice with the Secret Joy of Irony
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness - Wordsworth, Independence and Resolution, Stanza VII Children prove we all seek a better life. They quickly learn that walking helps them . They learn that talking gets them...
Folk Wisdom – Part 2 of 2
In this piece, Peter talks about the enduring power of inherited wisdom and how neglecting it leaves us unmoored. In a speech delivered in 1858, Abraham Lincoln foresaw the consequences of the ruinous Civil War that was to devastate his nation: “A house divided...
Folk Wisdom – Part 1 of 2
In this piece, Peter talks about how Hagar’s pride blinds her to the shared moral wisdom all humans depend on. In Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel, the combative central character Hagar Shipley (nee Currie) tells the story of her own life. The reader must be...
Fire: The Unforgiving Ironist
Writers have always feared and worshipped the most perilous ironist of all — the restless, consuming, and merciless fire. “It was a pleasure to burn.” Few first lines have scorched themselves so deeply into memory. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury gave us a world where...
Sea: The Oldest Ironist
Aashisha traces writers' obsession with the oldest ironist of all — the boundless, beloved, and beautiful sea. The sea is a fascinating concept, not only because water makes up three-fourths of the planet as well as the human body (thanks, fourth-grade writer mind)...
Rowing with Imagination – On Xenophon
Nigel writes an encomium for the Cost of Glory... Twenty minutes on the rowing machine and the display will dutifully say I have rowed 3.7 kilometres. But that is not really where I am. In my mind, memories merge. I am rowing from Miletus on the Maeander to Lesbos....
Ramblings #8 – Look Back and Learn
Nigel writes on the irony of hindsight, and how looking back is the only way we ever really learn. “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” - George Eliot, Middlemarch It is a long drive to Ottawa, and one that I have...