14 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
  2. johnhalbrooks.substack.com johnhalbrooks.substack.com
    1. I have left the word wyrd untranslated from the Old English. It means something like “fate” or “doom.” It is the ancestor of the modern English word weird. When Shakespeare refers to the witches in Macbeth as the “weird sisters,” he doesn’t mean that they are strange (though they are), but rather that they have to do with fate. Weird in its modern sense (meaning “strange” or “uncanny”) is probably connected to the mysterious or “weird” nature of fate.
  3. May 2023
  4. Mar 2022
    1. Finnemore initially dismissed the puzzle as too difficult for him to solve, but circumstances led him to reconsider. “The only way I'd even have a shot at it was if I were for some bizarre reason trapped in my own home for months on end, with nowhere to go and no-one to see,” Finnemore told The Telegraph in 2020. “Unfortunately, the universe heard me.”
  5. Dec 2019
    1. Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate

      Not called "science" until the mid-nineteenth century, "natural philosophy" was science in the tradition of England's Royal Society (begun 1660), with its emphasis on Baconian induction, careful experiment, and refusal of any older science that could not be proven and demonstrated in a laboratory.

  6. Aug 2018
    1. ; so Fate pronounc'd. But thou O Father, I forewarn thee, shun [ 810 ] His deadly arrow; neither vainly hope To be invulnerable in those bright Arms, Though temper'd heav'nly, for that mortal dint, Save he who reigns above, none can resist.

      Is Sin saying that Death could conquer Satan, and that basically Satan could die? And is she implying that the gods could die if Death conquered them? It's also worth noting that in myth, even the gods are at the mercy of Fate.

  7. Oct 2016
    1. Those are pearls that were his eyes

      This piece is repeated from the first book of the poem during the tarot reading. This repetition draws me back to that and makes me think that section has power through the entire poem. Not only that, but it takes on new meaning because this book has great emphasis on wealth and material items.

    2. Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

      I believe this is our drown Phoenician that was referenced in the tarot reading from the first book. The cards in a tarot reading will usually indicate your current position in life and future paths, and I feel like this whole book is a sort of warning that the recipient of the tarot reading was supposed to get. When we look to the last line of the book, it's ominous and warns caution.

  8. Sep 2016
    1. The doom in our blood comes back.

      In the final pages of the play, doom is really the only word to describe the sequence of events. Antigone kills herself before Creon changes his mind, and as a result, Creon's wife and son both commit suicide as well. By trying to establish order through dictatorial edicts, Creon alienates the people he is trying to protect and ultimately, they turn their back on him. Literally, they would rather die than live another moment in his Thebes. And like all Greek tragedies, this play proved to be incredibly ironic. In trying to keep order, Creon unleashes utter chaos upon Thebes.

  9. Feb 2014
    1. However, the Pythian priestess declared that the Heraclidae would have vengeance on Gyges' posterity in the fifth generation; an utterance to which the Lydians and their kings paid no regard until it was fulfilled

      Hdt. 1.13 The oracle told Gyges that the Heraclidae would have vengeance in the fifth generation and they ignored this until it came true.

  10. Sep 2013
    1. Then rhetoric is of no use to us, Polus, in helping a man to excuse his own injustice,

      a foretelling of his own, indisputable fate