A Perpetual Pilgrim

A Perpetual Pilgrim had its origins in a bland largely informative professional website that I maintained for several years. It comprised several sections: bibliography, which provided an annotated list of my published writings, together with downloadable PDF versions of some pieces; biography, with an abridged CV, together with references to books, articles and interviews that describe my work; announcements about ongoing classes and future lectures, seminars and conferences; and links to valuable resources. It reflected my public life, and to the extent that it was kept current (not always the case), it was effective, and served its purpose.

But I also sought a more interactive medium, one that would be more personal, with which I could post fresh, unpolished comments, insights and observations and invite responses from, and dialogue with, my cyber correspondents. I didn’t want to abandon the information storehouse function, and it was obvious that I had needed a hybrid, a blog cum resource center. Now my friends all know that I am a technophile, that I was involved with personal computers from their beginnings (does anyone out there remember the KayPro, a wonderful CP/M machine that you upgraded with a penknife, and which succumbed in the world ruled by DOS?). The challenge was irresistible: I would design my own, and did, with moderate success. Continue reading »

During my formal schooling, which was perpetrated on my person in one of the finer English private schools, traditional wisdom was generally held in contemptuous disregard. Many were its mockers, legion were its scoffers. But chief among those who assumed, or were assigned, the task of proclaiming the superiority of the moderns over the ancients, of demonstrating the foolishness of fuddy-duddy philosophers and bigotted clerics, were the chemistry teachers, and one in particular, that sweet-tongued, gentle usher Mr. Smith.

Now such an appointment might seem odd, possibly inconsequential, but in retrospect I think I can understand the larger scheme: would not Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, king of chemists, be a more trustworthy champion of the unimpeded expansion of human knowledge than an Isaac Newton, prince of physicists, but also a life-long alchemist? Even Lavoisier’s final appearance, lying horizontal and headless (or bodiless, depending on one’s perspective on the locus of personhood) at the foot of Madame Guillotine, on one of her busier days during those terrible days of the Terror, further established his status as martyred saint of science. Before he was snuffed out, Lavoisier had extinguished the phlogiston theory of combustion, and demonstrated with marvelous and irrefutable clarity the role of oxygen in the formation of fire — and that was that: God remained in (or was confined to) his heavens, Adam and his descendents stayed in their proper place, the earth, and the gulf between the two, between the upper, celestial firmaments and the lower, terrestrial provinces, became broad and unbridgeable. Continue reading »

I have spent much time recently pondering over Psalm 118. I have been drawn in particular to verses 19 and 20, “Open for me the gates of righteousness; I will enter them, and I will praise YAH;/ This is the gate to YHVH into which the righteous shall pass.” The opening words in the original Hebrew are Pithu li sha’arei Tzedeq. What is not reflected in the translation is that the verb Pithu is a plural imperative. Continue reading »