Comus

“A man who had learned to throw a grain of millet through the eye of a needle with unfailing accuracy performed this feat for another man, whose response to it I applaud.  He was asked afterwards for some present as a reward for such rare ability; whereupon he ordered, very humorously and in my opinion...

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” Jorge Louis Borges For those of us born before 1960, Borges’ words resonate. We lived at a time when you could go to your local public library and read all day long without anyone troubling youn or your parents worrying that you would...

The archer who overshoots his target misses as much as the one who does not reach it. And my eyes trouble me as much when I raise them suddenly to a strong light as when I drop them into the shadow.  Michel de Montaigne. “On Moderation.” In her magisterial work, Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor creates...

If you live long enough, you’ll not only see everything but be troubled by most of it. Our age cannot be counted on to remain the same for very long.  But that is, by and large, a good thing. Too much sameness will dull our senses for the curious and odd. Yet, there is in...

If you can recall George Orwell’s 1984, you’ll see many similarities in what follows. For those of you who need a refresher, Winston Smith, living in a superstate called Oceania, is caught up in the “party’s” overreach to the point he can no longer go on. His job is to rewrite history according to the...

If we’re honest, progress is not exactly what it’s cracked up to be. For every step forward, we seem to make three back. The key, of course, as great minds have reminded us, is to keep going. There are, however, times when ‘keeping going’ is not the easiest thing to do when frustration intercedes. The...

We are knee-deep in Lent, and it seemed only right to pause for a moment and think about that. This may well be the only place you’ll read any sort of reflection in a secular press, and it is a testament to the Tega Cay Sun that it tolerates Comus as much as it does....

Sometimes you have to hunt far and wide to describe a thing, especially when it is a specific thing that has no handy word for it. This German word comes closest to describing the phenomenon that Comus seeks to describe now. The word translates literally as ”foreign-shame.”  That may seem a little odd, but when...

Any conservative can tell you that the media, the mainstream one, are biased.  Their perfidy is well-known and stretches back, not decades, but centuries. Tulip Mania, a 1637 phenomenon, exploded on the scene when certain tulips sold for ten times their value.  While there were no media as we know them, pamphlets, sermons, broadsheets, and...

For most of my adult life, the climate change people have been trying to scare everyone to death.  It’s a bit ironic because they were telling us that we were going to die sooner rather than later, so I suppose scaring everyone was a quick way to put an end to everything.  At one point,...

It’s been many decades since Comus watched the weather for a school snow day.  When one lives in the South, even a flake of snow can cause disruption.  Many were the days, sixty years ago, when Comus avidly watched the weather for the hoped-for day off from school.  In my hometown, the local weather stations...

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen to ‘oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 11, lines 217-220   Those six or seven readers from last week will know that Comus wrote...

Before we get too far along, let me explain the headline.  A 14th-century French philosopher, Jean Buridan,  is attributed with the phrase, or so the saying goes, by creating the following dilemma.  He posed, perhaps erroneously so, that a fictitious, but hungry donkey, if placed between two equally distant stacks of hay, would starve to...

A wag once said that the opposite of progress is Congress. If you’ve lived long enough, you know that the statement is more true than amusing.  But there comes a time in the lives of all men and women when a moral stand is called for.  And there also comes a time in the lives...

Given that this is the season, it’s likely that you’ve seen holly and ivy just about everywhere you look.  We decorate with them, we garland with them, we sing about them, we use the real thing, we use the fake version, and every other Christmas card has one or the other or both featured on...

Last week, this column took to task the continuing decline of dress in public, or rather, the rise of the undressed. That column talked about the need, a desperate one in my mind, for full-length mirrors. Of all the things government could give us, placing a full-length mirror in every home, as opposed to a...

Nothing spells failure more quickly than a writer whose first column annoys his few readers as this one, which is certain to strike opprobrium, ab initio.  I’m not one for trigger warnings, but consider this, if you favor them, as your tocsin. So, let’s get right to it. A few weeks ago, Sean P. Duffy,...