Word: erasmus
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...send him off to school. The schools were not, by and large, free. Nor were they compulsory in the sense that every child in a certain area had to attend them. Some fortunate boys were educated in grammar schools with college in mind: they studied the Bible, Erasmus, Aesop, Ovid, Cicero, Vergil, Homer, Hesiod; Latin and Greek. Above all, there was what might be called a strongly moral education. Such an education for the colonists was by definition religious-God's will made known to the child...
...debilitating fragmentation, Chiang performed a critical service for the nation, one that paved the way for greater centralization under the Communists. But in the final analysis, given the scope of his problems, it is not surprising that he was unable to construct a durable political system. "In great things," Erasmus once wrote, "it is enough to have tried." Chiang's try was on a grand scale. His failure in the end diminishes but should not obscure his historical importance...
...Kant's "Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone," Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy." As you read a few lines here, a few there, the printed words slowly vanish and are replaced by an image of yourself dressed in Renaissance robes, poring over an illuminated manuscript in an Erasmus-like tower. You lean over and look out the window at the little groups of women walking to market and children playing tag, a couple of lovers smiling at one another in the grass, and a frown comes over your face, you shake your head, and, with a slight disdainful...
...pieces of American fiction (see following reviews). Both are profoundly American in style and subject: Roth's The Great American Novel, a satiric fantasy about a mythical baseball league; Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, a surrealist account of a car dealer in the Midwest. Vonnegut is the Erasmus of the black comedians, who feels life as tragedy but tries to see it as a joke that can be ruefully shared. Roth at 40 is some sort of jet-propelled dervish who whirls through literature, demolishing forms, spinning off royalty checks, and leaving everybody (including Roth himself perhaps...
...creating what? Historian Arnold Toynbee finds that "a real beginning of fusion" is under way, raising the prospect of the first genuinely European era since the early 16th century of Erasmus and St. Thomas More, when Latin-speaking scholars could still wan der freely over a continent that had not yet been divided by the Reformation, the first stirrings of nationalism and embryonic dreams of empire. On the eve of Prime Minister Edward Heath's talks with West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in Bonn last week, the normally restrained London Times not only praised Brandt's "moral authority...