Month: October 2025
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A Meditation on Death
In the early 19th century, a school of landscape painters, later coined the Hudson River School, flourished alongside the American conservation movement. Influenced by the European Romantic era, the Hudson River School celebrated and idealized nature above that made by man. Founded by the English émigré Thomas Cole in 1825, its beginning was marked by…
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Neptune
The planet Neptune is the farthest planet orbiting the Sun and is invisible to the naked eye. In 1613, Galileo Galilei had mapped the planet with his telescope, but he mistakenly perceived it as a star, even though he appeared to observe that it had moved relative to other fixed stars. Rather it was unexpected…
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Jupiter
In 1307, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri wrote The Convivio, a sort of encyclopedia of general knowledge of his time. In its second volume he paid tribute to his lifelong muse Beatrice Portinari, who lived “in heaven with the angels and on earth with [his] soul.” Proceeding to discuss the heavens, Dante allegorized them to…
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Mars
The planet Mars, also known as the Red Planet, is named after the Roman god of war. The association between Mars and war goes back to the Babylonian civilization, in which the planet was known as Nergal, the deity of death, fire, and destruction. Anthropologists disagree upon whether warfare was common throughout human history, but…
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The Moon
While the global calendar in use for official activities is the solar calendar, which keeps track of the Sun’s position relative to the stars, many parts of the world also maintain another calendar, which keeps track of the Moon’s phases. The moon makes a complete orbit around the earth in 28 days, but it takes…
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