The Ironist
Differing Perspectives
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...
What The Remains of the Day Teaches About Life’s Ironies
In The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro holds up a mirror to our own compromises— how much of life we trade away in the name of duty. “The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.” I wish. To be...
Irony #2 – The Virtue of the Ironist
Irony and the human condition: Peter Scotchmer on why double vision matters more than ever. “…the ironist is caught in a boundary zone between two opposed and mutually exclusive perspectives… between the necessity to believe in the world as it ought to be, and the...
The Banality of Evil
Irony, #1 – Hannah Arendt, the Refugee from Königsberg - Nigel writes about a stateless thinker who made irony her weapon against totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture Königsberg was a jewel on the coast of the Baltic. For...
In Defence of Leisure
Forget "live-to-work". The ancients believed leisure—not work—was the highest purpose of human life. In this essay, Jonathan defends self-cultivation through art, conversation, and exploration. “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem,...