Category: Blog Post

“In the Image of God: John Comenius and the First Children’s Picture Book” at The Public Domain Review

God's Providence, from Orbis Sensualium Pictus

I’ve written an essay for The Public Domain Review on John Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, widely considered to be the first children’s picture book. It was published in 1658, and it became enormously popular throughout Europe. Its author also became a famous figure in the history of education in his own right: his portrait was painted by Rembrandt, and he was asked to become the President of Harvard College.

In this essay, I look at the challenge of illustrating the divine, the invisible, and the abstract. The Orbis aims to educate children using familiar sights and sounds from their experience, but such an approach becomes problematic when discussing topics like God, the soul, and the Last Judgment.

You can find my essay here, and you can browse the other really fascinating material at The Public Domain Review at their excellent website.

[Update: Thanks to both The Paris Review Daily and The Dish for featuring this essay.]

Homeless in Concourse D

Homeless Man Sleeping on Sidewalk, from Wikipedia

A man rests his head on a pile of dirty shirts and curls his legs up next to a heating vent. He is tired after toting the necessities of life around all day. Before he shuts his eyes for the night, he pulls his iPhone out of his blazer’s inside pocket and checks the status of his rebooked flight.

For Americans whose travels follow a constellation of airline hubs, a night stuck in the airport is a familiar experience. When hotels are too full or connections too early, it is simply easier to push benches together into a makeshift twin mattress.

These uncomfortable nights are the closest most Americans will ever get to homelessness.

The last month of polar vortices and wintry mixes has inflicted this quasi-homelessness on many travelers (including me). Men in tailored suits huddle on the floor in Concourse D. Sleepy young women in Ivy League sweatshirts scavenge for a bathroom, toothbrush in hand. Oily-haired travelers bathe themselves in public sinks, and we greet them with sympathetic smiles, not averted grimaces.

Image courtesy ericahintergardt, flickr

We accept airport vagrancy as an unavoidable and mildly unpleasant side-effect of flying, a miraculous kind of slowed-down teleportation. But why do we empathize so readily with those who suffer this temporary “homelessness” but remain comparatively callous to the homeless on our streets and in our subways?

According to an Aristotelian theory of emotions found in his Poetics, we feel pity (eleos) for air travelers stuck on the terminal floor because we recognize that they had no direct agency in their ill fate. And we feel fear (phobos) upon realizing that we, too, could find ourselves bleary-eyed, staring at the Jamba Juice closing at midnight.

From a sociological perspective, we understand that codes of conduct disintegrate in times of distress. Thucydides wrote about the uncivilized funeral practices in the aftermath of the plague of the Peloponnesian War: “Sacred places…were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane” (II.52). What we might take to be an unsanitary floor in the afternoon becomes the closely-guarded nighttime property of a vagrant traveler. That shift makes sense to us.

David Fleming at ESPN points to a more modern and lighthearted example: public defecation. At the 2005 London Marathon, Paula Radcliffe set a world record, but about four miles from the finish line, she “simply placed one hand on a metal crowd barricade for balance, used the other to curtain her shorts to the side and perched, precariously, over her shoes. Then, as they say in England, she proceeded to ‘have a poo’ right there on the street and in broad daylight, within two feet of a startled spectator.” Normally, we might curse at a public pooper, but here, we clapped for her.

Whether it’s a matter of Aristotelian psychology or competitive desperation, we can understand the need to break social codes at the airport. But of course, airport “strandedness” is downright luxurious compared to actual homelessness. It’s not so bad: terminals have heat and clean water. For those homeless travelers lucky enough to find an outlet, there is electricity — maybe even free WiFi to facilitate revisiting your favorite episodes of My So-Called Life. In fact, many travelers even choose this plush quasi-homelessness instead of booking hotels. For a tiny fraction of the 644 million travelers who find themselves sleeping on the floor, the worst outcome is usually a sore neck and a lackluster bagel the next morning (paid for with a meal voucher, of course).

But for millions of Americans, homelessness means living in unsafe and inclement cityscapes, ravaged by the same winter weather that left others stranded with heat, power, and an airline-branded blanket in O’Hare. But do we withhold pity because we tell ourselves we would never make the poor life choices that lead to sleeping on a bench? Do we not fear we might also end up bathing in a sink?

As air travel shows us, misfortune picks at random, and she sometimes picks me. Sometimes you.

When we next see truly unfortunate souls on our streets, let us remember these Aristotelian lessons of pity and fear. We should not withhold our empathy just because when we catch a night-long glimpse of our own homelessness, we are able to fly away from it the next morning.

New Publication on Astrology, Stoicism, and Lucian

Fictional Image of Lucian, courtesy of Wikipedia

I wrote an article in Peitho: Examina Antiqua called “Stoic Caricature in Lucian’s De astrologia: Verisimilitude As Comedy”

You can find the article here at the journal or here at Columbia Academic Commons (PDF format).

I argue that De astrologia, a text transmitted with Lucian’s texts but often thought to be spurious, is in fact of Lucian’s hand. The argument centers around the narrator’s failed attempt at earning his audience’s credibility. I conclude the article by comparing the style of comedy in De astrologia to that of a famous SNL sketch where Tina Fey lampoons Sarah Palin by quoting the Governor’s exact words.