Category Archives: chronicle

People learn to read accounts, regulations and commercial texts before they learn how to read novels, poetry and philosophy. In the history of the West, the spread of literacy was through the medium of practical texts. Pragmatic literacy always comes first. The ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii are covered in electoral graffiti. TheContinue reading “Pragmatic literacy”

There had been human roads before there were any milestones. It may be that the ancient Romans were the first to come up with a way of marking points along a road that would help cartography and navigation. Not to mention human psychology. The oldest Roman milestone was the one on Via Appia, just outsideContinue reading “Milestones”

The best books are infinite, reproducing themselves for as long as there are people to read. There are two types of infinity when it comes to the written word. One is related to a book’s ability to be duplicated, by hand or machine, into new exemplars, like organisms breeding new individuals. This way, the book’sContinue reading “Infinite literature”

Some words contain entire stories in themselves. Their history is obvious and we are alive to it as we use them. Others are just code pointing to something else, sounds and sign which we use without paying much attention to their own history. An etymological awareness brings us closer to realities lying beyond the sign,Continue reading “The roots of words”

If in many areas the moderns built on the foundations laid by the ancients, extending their legacy, in rhetoric, tropes and stylistic devices there was not much else to add to what the classical word had established. All the rules, types and classifications of rhetorical composition and practice were discussed at length by classical theorists.Continue reading “Flowers and thorns”

Could it be that our pride in the benefit of hindsight, our conceited belief that the passage of time has made us better than our predecessors ultimately comes from the fact that ruins always lie beneath our feet, and we are always looking down, rather than back, on the past? The historian dealing with documentsContinue reading “The presumptuous present”

The rejection of the present in favour of an alternative condition, state or situation had always been a function of two things : imagination and anthropomorphism. The former is socially praised today (it hasn’t always been), while the latter has been under attack by the elites as part of a larger critique against the violenceContinue reading “Imagination and anthropocentrism”

Artificial intelligence, to be intelligent, has to pass the Turing test. There is no equivalent test for a person to pass to be a person. Perhaps there should be. A decency, or a violence, test. A spiritual test? A test of self-consciousness? A mythography test? As long as we can’t agree on what makes usContinue reading “The ‘I’ in A.I.”

The modern metropolis may be a hub of languages and cultures, a shared space where strangers become less strange and everyone finds a place. Yet the Industrial Revolution which produced the modern city, vertical, busy, industrious, was not particularly inclined, it seems to me, towards the form of urbanity that we are so familiar withContinue reading “Cosmopolitan cities and speakers”

Just as there is a history of Hell, there should also be a Hell of history, the Inferno of the historical profession. One of the many things we are indebted to Dante for is that he’s put Hell on the map. Before him, Hell was a place. After him, it is not only Others, butContinue reading “The Inferno of History”