This is simply beautiful:
When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
The third installment of the Jonathan Benjamin Franklin Series
Here’s a trivia question for you. What is the etymology of the word trivia? Maybe this will surprise you.
The word is derived from the roman words tre and via (three roads) and alluded to a meeting place. That led to the connotation of commonplace.
That in turn led to its use to refer to the study of grammar, rhetoric and logic in the English public schools, an undergraduate curriculum, in which no graduate student could be interested. They were trivial. The real subjects, the more challenging ones, were arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.
This from Robert Browning (everyone knows the first part):
If a man’s reach does not exceed his grasp, what is heaven for?
And this:
Browning was teaching a class one day and a woman raised her hand. “Professor Browning,” she said. “I love your poetry and I have read all your poems. There is one line, however, I just don’t understand.” She quoted the line. “Can you tell me what you meant?”
Browning considered the question for a moment. Then he said, “You know, when I wrote that line only God and I knew what it meant.” He paused, then continued, “Now only God knows.”
David Gersh 