Author Archives: R. W. Livingston

What Should We Lose by Our Ignorance?

Imagine for a moment that we had never heard the names of Greece and Rome. What should we lose by our ignorance? Those of us who read poetry would find much that was unintelligible in English authors, in all English poets, I think, without exception, from Chaucer to Rupert Brooke. We should not know in […]

More Important Than The Cosmos Itself

More Important than the cosmos man in front of board, with equations floating around him

Education, it has been said, should knock windows into the world for us. We are born into a closed and darkened room: As the windows are opened, we see, here, man, with all his character and capacities, experiments, endless achievements, and possibilities, there, the material world itself, the elements that compose, and unexpected laws that […]

Why Literature Matters

Why Read Literature?

Why read literature? This question is often asked by indignant parents, who want to know why their children, destined for business, learn fancy subjects instead of things serviceable to them in life. Lord Morley says somewhere: “An educated man is one who knows when a thing is proved and when it is not. An uneducated […]

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