The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Culture

Introduction

Daily Devotionals have long been a favored tool of those looking for a regular dose of spiritual growth. Bedside volumes, read upon waking in the morning or before retiring at night, Devotionals consist of 365 exercises in learning and reflection. One easily digestible entry is tackled each day.

The Intellectual Devotional is a secular compendium in the same tradition. It is one year’s worth of daily readings that will refresh your spirit, stimulate your mind, and help complete your education. Each entry is drawn from a different field of knowledge: History, Literature, Visual Arts, Science, Music, Philosophy, and Religion. Read one passage a day and you will explore each subject once a week.

These readings offer the kind of regular exercise the brain requires to stay fresh, especially as we age. They represent an escape from the day-to-day grind into the rarefied realm of human wisdom. And, they will open new horizons of intellectual discovery.

A brief summary of the journey ahead…

MONDAY—HISTORY

A survey of people and events that shaped the development of Western civilization.

TUESDAY—LITERATURE

A look at great writers and a synopsis of their most important works—poems and novels that continue to inspire readers today.

WEDNESDAY—VISUAL ARTS

An introduction to the artists and artistic movements that yielded the world’s most influential paintings, sculptures, and works of architecture.

THURSDAY—SCIENCE

From the origin of black holes to a description of how batteries work, the wonders of science are simplified and revealed.

FRIDAY—MUSIC

What inspired our greatest composers, how to read a sheet of notes, and why Mozart is so revered—a comprehensive review of our musical heritage.

SATURDAY—PHILOSOPHY

From ancient Greece to the twentieth century, the efforts of humankind’s greatest thinkers to explain the meaning of life and the universe.

SUNDAY—RELIGION

An overview of the world’s major religions and their beliefs.

We hope your progress through this collection of knowledge inspires your curiosity and opens new areas of exploration in your life.

—David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim

WEEK 1

MONDAY, DAY 1 HISTORY

The Alphabet

About 2000 BC, the Egyptian pharaohs realized they had a problem. With each military victory over their neighbors, they captured and enslaved more prisoners of war. But the Egyptians could not pass down written orders to these slaves as they could not read hieroglyphics.

Early writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, were extremely cumbersome and difficult to learn. These systems had thousands of characters, with each symbol representing an idea or word. Memorizing them could take years. Only a handful of Egyptians could actually read and write their complicated script.

Linguists believe that almost all modern alphabets are derived from the simplified version of hieroglyphics devised by the Egyptians four thousand years ago, possibly to communicate with their slaves. The development of an alphabet, the writing system used throughout the Western world, changed the way the ancients communicated.

In the simplified version, each character represented only a sound. This innovation cut back the number of characters from a few thousand to a few dozen, making it far easier to learn and use the characters. The complicated hieroglyphic language was eventually forgotten, and scholars were not able to translate the characters until the translation of the Rosetta stone in 1882.

The alphabet was extremely successful. When the Egyptian slaves eventually migrated back to their home countries, they took the writing system with them. The alphabet spread across the Near East, becoming the foundation for many writing systems in the area, including Hebrew and Arabic. The Phoenicians, an ancient civilization of seaborne traders, spread the alphabet to the tribes they encountered along the Mediterranean coast. The Greek and Roman alphabets, in turn, were based on the ancient Phoenician script. Today most Western languages, including English, use the Roman alphabet.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Several letters in modern-day English are direct descendents of ancient Egyptian characters. For instance, the letter B derives from the Egyptian character for the word house.

2. The most recent print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 words in current usage, among the most of any language.

TUESDAY, DAY 2   LITERATURE

Ulysses

James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is widely regarded as the greatest novel written in English in the twentieth century. It retells Homer’s Odyssey in the context of a single day—June 16, 1904—in Dublin, Ireland, recasting Homer’s great hero Odysseus in the unlikely guise of Leopold Bloom, an aging, cuckolded ad salesman who spends the day running errands and making various business appointments before he returns home at long last.

Though Bloom seems unassuming and ordinary, he emerges as a heroic figure, displaying compassion, forgiveness, and generosity toward virtually everyone in the odd cast of characters he meets. In his mundane and often unnoticed deeds, he practices an everyday heroism that is perhaps the only heroism possible in the modern world. And despite the fact that he always feels like an outsider—he is a Jew in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland—Bloom remains optimistic and dismisses his insecurities.

Ulysses is celebrated for its incredibly rich portraits of characters, its mind-boggling array of allusions to other literary and cultural works, and its many innovations with language. Throughout the course of the novel, Joyce flirts with literary genres and forms ranging from drama to advertising copy to Old English. The novel is perhaps most famous for its extensive use of stream-of-consciousness narrative—Joyce’s attempt to render the inner thoughts of his characters exactly as they occur, with no effort to impose order or organization. This technique became a hallmark of modernist literature and influenced countless other writers, such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, who also experimented with it in their works.

Not surprisingly, Ulysses poses a difficult journey for the reader, especially its famous last chapter, which recounts the thoughts of Bloom’s wife, Molly. Molly’s reverie goes on for more than 24,000 words yet is divided into only eight mammoth sentences. Despite the challenge it poses, the chapter shows Joyce at his most lyrical, especially in the final lines, which reaffirm Molly’s love for her husband despite her infidelity:

and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

ADDITIONAL FACT

1. Ulysses was banned for obscenity in the United States for nearly twelve years because of its (mostly indirect) sexual imagery.

WEDNESDAY, DAY 3   VISUAL ARTS

Lascaux Cave Paintings

The cave paintings at Lascaux are among the earliest known works of art. They were discovered in 1940 near the village of Montignac in central France when four boys stumbled into a cave. Inside they found a series of rooms with nearly 1,500 paintings of animals that were between 15,000 and 17,000 years old.

There are several theories regarding the function of the paintings. A natural feature of the cave may have suggested the shape of an animal to a prehistoric observer who then added highlights to relay his vision to others. Since many of the paintings are located in inaccessible parts of the cave, they may have been used for magical practices. Possibly, prehistoric people believed that the act of drawing animals, especially with a high degree of accuracy, would bring the beasts under their control or increase their numbers in times of scarcity.

The animals are outlined or portrayed in silhouette. They are often shown in what is called twisted perspective, that is, with their heads in profile but their horns facing front. Many of the images include dots, linear patterns, and other designs that may carry symbolic meaning.

The most magnificent chamber of the cave, known as the Great Hall of the Bulls, contains a painted narrative. From left to right, the pictures depict the chase and capture of an aurochs herd.

As soon as the paintings had been examined and identified as Paleolithic, the caves were opened to the public in 1948. By 1955, however, it became increasingly evident that exposure to as many as 1,200 visitors per day was taking its toll on the works inside. Although protective measures were taken, the site closed in 1963. In order to satisfy public demand, a life-sized replica of the cave was completed in 1983, only 200 meters from the original.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. The cave painters were conscious of visual perspective; they painted figures high on the wall, styled so that they would not appear distorted to the viewer below.

2. The only human figure depicted in the cave appears in the Shaft of the Dead Man. The fact that it is drawn more crudely than the animals suggests that they did not think it was endowed with magical properties.

THURSDAY, DAY 4   SCIENCE

Cloning

In 1997, a baby sheep named Dolly introduced the world to reproductive cloning. She was a clone because she and her mother shared the same nuclear DNA; in other words, their cells carried the same genetic material. They were like identical twins reared generations apart.

Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland created Dolly by a process called nuclear transfer. Taking the genetic material from an adult donor cell, they transferred it into an unfertilized egg whose genetic material had been removed. In Dolly’s case, the donor cell came from the mammary gland of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe. The researchers then gave the egg an electric shock, and it began dividing into an embryo.

One of the reasons Dolly’s creation was so astounding was that it proved to the scientific community that a cell taken from a specialized part of the body could be used to create a whole new organism. Before Dolly, almost all scientists believed that once a cell became specialized it could only produce other specialized cells: A heart cell could only make heart cells, and a liver cell could only make liver cells. But Dolly was made entirely from a cell extracted from her mother’s mammary gland, proving that specialized cells could be completely reprogrammed.

In many ways, Dolly was not like her mother. For example, her telomeres were too short. Telomeres are thin strands of protein that cap off the ends of chromosomes, the structures that carry genes. Although no one is sure exactly what telomeres do, they seem to help protect and repair our cells. As we age, our telomeres get shorter and shorter. Dolly received her mother’s six-year-old telomeres, so from birth, Dolly’s telomeres were shorter than the average lamb her age. Although Dolly appeared to be mostly normal, she was euthanized in 2004 at the age of six, after suffering from lung cancer and crippling arthritis. The average Finn Dorset sheep lives to age eleven or twelve.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Since 1997, cattle, mice, goats, and pigs have been successfully cloned using nuclear transfer.

2. The success rate for cloning is very low in all species. Published studies report that about 1 percent of reconstructed embryos survive birth. But since unsuccessful attempts largely go unreported, the actual number might be much lower.

3. Before she died, Dolly was the mother of six lambs, all bred the old-fashioned way.

4. A group of Korean researchers claimed to have cloned a human embryo in 1998, but their experiment was terminated at the 4-cell stage, so there was no evidence of their success.

FRIDAY, DAY 5   MUSIC

The Basics of Music

Music is organized sound that can be replicated through imitation or notation. Music is distinct from noise in that the sounds of a door creaking open or fingernails on a blackboard are irregular and disorganized. The sound waves that map these noises are complex and cannot be heard as identifiable pitches.

Some of the basic ways that we analyze musical sounds are:

PITCH: How high or how low a sound is to the ear. Pitch is measured technically by the frequency of a sound wave, or how often waves repeat themselves. In western music there are twelve unique pitches (C, C-sharp or D-flat, D, D-sharp or E-flat, E, F, F-sharp or G-flat, G, G-sharp or A-flat, A, A-sharp or B-flat, and B). The pitches followed by sharps or flats are called accidentals, and they are most easily described as the black keys on the piano keyboard. They are located musically, one half step between the two pitches on either side of them. For example, D-sharp and E-flat have the same pitch. When referring to pitches in the context of notated, or written music, they are called notes.

SCALE: A stepwise arrangement of pitches (for example, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C) that often serves as the basis for a melody. A piece, or a portion of a piece, will often use only notes found in a particular scale. Western music primarily uses the major scale or the minor scale, in one form or another. To most people, the major scale, because of its particular arrangement of pitches, has the quality of sounding bright, happy, or positive. A minor scale, likewise, is usually described as dark, sad, or negative.

KEY: An arrangement or system of pitches, usually based on one of the major or minor scales, that is meant to serve as a reference point and a guiding force of a melody. The tonic of a key is often the starting and ending point for a piece written in a particular key—so if a piece is in E major, then the pitch E will serve as the piece’s tonal center.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. All of these basic elements can be notated on the staff, which is a repeating set of five parallel horizontal lines. Often it is divided into measures to indicate metric divisions in the piece and marked at the beginning of each staff of the page with a clef to indicate reference points for identifying pitches.

2. When a piece strays from its basic key, this is called modulation. Keys are indicated in written music by a key signature at the beginning of each staff.

3. There are hundreds of scales used in the world’s many different musical cultures. In India, music played on the sitar and other instruments chooses pitches from a collection of twenty-two possibilities, with the distances between scale steps sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than those used in Western music. This can make differences between pitches extremely subtle and demands a high virtuosity from Indian classical musicians.

SATURDAY, DAY 6   PHILOSOPHY

Appearance and Reality

Throughout its history, one of the great themes of philosophy has been the distinction between appearance and reality. This distinction was central to the thought of the earliest philosophers, called the Presocratics because they lived in the time before the Greek philosopher Socrates (469–399 BC).

The Presocratics believed that the ultimate nature of reality was vastly different from the way it ordinarily appeared to them. For instance, one philosopher named Thales held that appearances notwithstanding, all reality was ultimately composed of water; Heraclitus thought the world was built from fire. Further, Heraclitus maintained that everything was constantly in motion. Another thinker, Parmenides, insisted that nothing actually moved and that all apparent motion was an illusion.

The Presocratics took seriously the possibility that all of reality was ultimately made up of some more fundamental substance. And they suspected that uncritical, everyday observation tends to present us with a misleading picture of the world. For these reasons, their thinking is often considered a precursor to modern science as well as philosophy.

Many later philosophers—including Plato, Spinoza, and Leibniz—followed in this tradition and presented alternative models of reality, which they claimed were closer to the truth than ordinary, commonsense views of the world.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. The distinction between appearance and reality is also central to the venerable philosophical tradition known as skepticism .

2. Immanuel Kant also addressed the difference between appearance and reality. He distinguished between things we experience and what he called a thing-in-itself.

SUNDAY, DAY 7   RELIGION

Torah

The Torah is the name generally given to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, or the Five Books of Moses. Christians refer to these books, along with other Jewish texts, as the Old Testament. The word Torah can also refer to the entire breadth of Jewish law encompassing several texts as well as oral traditions.

The Five Books of Moses are the basis for the 613 laws that govern the Jewish faith, and they are the foundation for the world’s three great monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are as follows:

GENESIS: Tells the story of creation as well as the history of the Israelites, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their families

EXODUS: Recounts the exodus from Egypt to Canaan, including Moses receiving the Ten Commandments

LEVITICUS: Contains the rules and practices of worship

NUMBERS: Relates the journey of the Israelites in the wilderness

DEUTERONOMY: Consists of speeches made by Moses at the end of his life that recount Israelite history and ethical teachings

The five books are traditionally believed to have been given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Alternative theories claim that the beginning of the Torah was given on Mount Sinai but that the revelation continued throughout Moses’s life.

Historically, archaeologists have argued that the Torah was written sometime between the tenth and sixth centuries BC. Proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis, which according to Orthodox Jews is heretical, claim that the original five books came from four sources, eventually compiled into one by a fifth author or redactor. The arguments in favor of this theory are the multiple names used for God, varying styles of writing, and the repetition of stories.

From the beginning, the Torah was accompanied by an oral tradition, which was necessary for its complete understanding. Although it was thought to be blasphemous to write the oral tradition down, the necessity for doing so eventually became apparent, leading to the creation of the Mishna. Later, as rabbis discussed and debated these two texts, the Talmud was written in order to compile their arguments.

The Jewish tradition uses the text of the Torah to derive innumerable laws and customs. Rabbinic scholars have spent entire lifetimes parsing every word for meaning.

ADDITIONAL FACT

1. Torah scrolls, written in Hebrew by hand, contain 304,805 letters and may take more than a year to produce. If a single mistake is made, the entire scroll becomes invalid.

WEEK 2

MONDAY, DAY 1 HISTORY

Hammurabi’s Code of Laws

Hammurabi was a king of Babylonia, an ancient civilization in present-day Iraq. He ruled from 1792 to 1750 BC and conquered several rival nations, but he is most famous as history’s first lawyer. Near the end of his reign, Hammurabi issued one of the first written codes of law in recorded history, which spelled out the rules for his citizens and the punishments for lawbreakers. The very concept of laws that applied to everyone was an unheard-of novelty in Hammurabi’s time, when most societies were governed only by the whims of their despotic rulers.

The code itself, however, was extremely cruel by modern standards. Hammurabi prescribed the death penalty for even minor infractions. Priestesses who entered a tavern, men who harbored runaway slaves, and wives who left their husbands without good cause were all subject to capital punishment. The crude code reflected the superstitions of its ancient society. In disputes between Babylonian citizens, Hammurabi’s code called for the accused to jump into a river. If he was guilty, he would drown. But if he was innocent, he would escape unhurt, and the accuser would be put to death for making a false charge.

The king’s scribes wrote the laws on a black stone pillar that was dedicated to the god of justice and displayed in public. In the inscription, Hammurabi called on all coming generations to observe the laws and not to alter the law of the land which I have given. Future kings, Hammurabi said, must uphold the rule of law rather than govern according to their own impulses. The notion that rulers could not arbitrarily change the laws governing their citizens was a revolutionary concept. Respect for the rule of law remains one of the fundamental hallmarks of successful governments.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. The pillar that displayed Hammurabi’s laws was unearthed in 1901 by a French archaeologist and now stands in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

2. Hammurabi’s code was inscribed in cuneiform, a complex writing system used by most ancient civilizations in the Near East. Modern scholars were unable to decode cuneiform characters until 1837.

3. Babylonian scientists used a counting system based on the number sixty, which is why minutes have sixty seconds.

TUESDAY, DAY 2   LITERATURE

Ernest Hemingway

Among the major American writers of the twentieth century, few have been as influential or imitated as Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)—and few have had as many detractors. Renowned for his novels and short stories, Hemingway became such a public figure during his life—and constructed such an extensive mythology around himself—that it is sometimes difficult to separate the legend from the reality.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, Hemingway had writerly aspirations early on; by eighteen, he was employed as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. Within months, he landed a position as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, where he was wounded. After the war, he spent several years in Paris in the company of Gertrude Stein and other expatriate American writers of the so-called Lost Generation, who were disillusioned by the war’s brutality. In Paris Hemingway refined his trademark style—a repetitive, stripped-down, self-consciously masculine prose that is deceptive in its seeming simplicity.

After writing a number of short stories based on his boyhood summers in upper Michigan and his later travels through Europe, Hemingway penned his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). This book, about a disaffected young American whiling away time in Spain and France, brought Hemingway instant acclaim. He followed with A Farewell to Arms (1929), a tragic World War I romance between an American ambulance driver and an English nurse, and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a tale of guerrillas in the Spanish Civil War that was inspired by Hemingway’s own work as a journalist during the conflict. The protagonist of the latter novel epitomizes what many have termed the Hemingway code hero—a stoic, disillusioned male who exhibits grace and nobility in the face of violence and adversity.

As his fame increased, Hemingway earned—and cultivated—a reputation for writing only about war, bullfighting, hunting, big-game fishing, and other overtly masculine topics. Though some critics dismissed Hemingway’s work as macho posturing, the undeniably masterful storytelling of his novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952) earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Even with this crowning achievement, Hemingway spent his last years mired in depression and declining health, ultimately taking his own life with a shotgun in 1961. His influence on the style of the modern novel, however, remains monumental.

ADDITIONAL FACT

1. The annual Imitation Hemingway Contest draws hundreds of entries that pay mock homage to the author’s unmistakable style. Past honorees include pieces entitled The Old Man and the Flea and For Whom the Cash Flows .

WEDNESDAY, DAY 3   VISUAL ARTS

Bust of Nefertiti

One of the most famous works of Egyptian art, the limestone bust of Nefertiti was discovered in 1912 by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt near the modern Egyptian town of Tell el-Amârna. It was found in the workshop of the ancient sculptor Thutmose and smuggled out of the country disguised as pieces of broken pottery.

Nefertiti was the most important queen of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who ruled Egypt from 1353 to 1335 BC. During his rule, the pharaoh changed his name to Akhenaton—one who serves Aten, the Sun God—and embraced a new, monotheistic religion that emphasized ethics. Nefertiti was granted high status, equal nearly to that of her husband. Some scholars believe that she was the force behind the new religion and that she even ruled as co-regent for some time. After Akhenaton’s death, nearly all traces of him and his powerful wife were wiped out, perhaps by the priests whose religion they had rejected.

Nefertiti’s bust, which is nearly 3,400 years old and about twenty inches tall, was found in nearly perfect condition. Only the earlobes were chipped. The work was left unfinished, however, since the left eye socket seems never to have been filled. It is possible that Thutmose used the bust as a model for his pupils. Whether the bust captures the queen’s likeness or portrays an ideal beauty is open to question.

A controversy erupted in 2003 when Joann Fletcher, a British archaeologist funded by the Discovery Channel, identified a previously discovered mummy as Nefertiti. Although she offered substantial evidence, Egyptian authorities rejected her claims.

The bust can be seen today at the Altes Museum in Berlin. It remains not only one of the best known works of Egyptian art but also a model of feminine beauty, giving new significance to Nefertiti’s name, which translates to the beautiful one is come.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. In the last days of World War II, the bust of Nefertiti was moved out of the Soviet sector of Berlin, creating a dispute over its ownership. It was returned in 2005.

2. A Google search for Nefertiti turns up 472,000 hits, a testimony to the lasting power of her image in the twenty-first century.

3. A pair of Hungarian artists calling themselves Little Warsaw recently stirred a controversy by setting the bust of Nefertiti atop a headless sculpture of a woman in a transparent garment.

THURSDAY, DAY 4   SCIENCE

Eratosthenes

Many scientists in Ancient Greece believed the world was round. But none of them knew how big it was until the third century BC when Eratosthenes (c.276–194 BC), chief librarian of Alexandria, devised an ingenious way to measure the earth’s size.

Eratosthenes knew of a special well near Syene, Egypt. At noon on June 21, the longest day of the year, the sun’s rays penetrated all the way to the bottom of the well. This meant that the sun was directly overhead. Eratosthenes realized that if the sun was directly overhead in Syene, then its rays must be hitting at an angle in Alexandria, which was due north. If he could measure the angle by which the sun was off center, then he would have the clue he needed to extrapolate the size of the earth. So, at noon on June 21 in Alexandria, he took a measuring stick and captured the angle cast by its shadow.

Eratosthenes knew that the angle of the shadow was equivalent to the angle formed by the two cities and the center of the earth. So, he divided the size of that angle by 360, the number of degrees in a circle, to determine the fraction of the earth that separated the two cities. The answer was one-fiftieth. In other words, if you walked back and forth between Syene and Alexandria fifty times, then you would have walked the equivalent of the earth’s circumference.

All that remained was to measure the precise distance between the two cities. Eratosthenes hired a pacer, a professional walker trained in taking perfectly equal steps. From the measurements of the pacer, Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of earth to be 24,700 miles. Today, using the same principles developed by Eratosthenes 2,000 years ago, modern instruments estimate the distance around the equator to be 24,902 miles.

In Eratosthenes’s time, the known world extended from Spain to India. He believed that a vast ocean covered the rest of the world. If it weren’t for the enormity of the ocean, Eratosthenes thought it would be possible to sail from Spain to India by heading west. It was this idea that inspired Chistopher Columbus to undertake his famous voyage in 1492.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Eratosthenes was the first historian to seriously attempt to put historical events in chronological order. We use his dates for most of ancient history.

2. We also owe to Eratosthenes many modern concepts like longitude, latitude, musical scales, and prime numbers.

3. Other scientists in Eratosthenes’s time nicknamed him Beta, and it wasn’t because he was the coolest boy in his fraternity. Eratosthenes had so many interests that his contemporaries considered him a dabbler. To them, he was second-class, a beta.

FRIDAY, DAY 5   MUSIC

Melody

Melody, often referred to in everyday speech as the tune, is perhaps the most immediately recognizable element of music. A melody can be played on one instrument or many and, along with harmony and rhythm, is considered one of the three basic elements of all music.

A melody is a succession of pitches arranged in a tuneful sequence. The pitches make some sort of coherent sense or seem to belong together. Melody is distinct from harmony in that melody refers to several notes played one after another, not sounded in unison.

Over time, the definition of melody has grown to include sequences of notes that would have seemed adventurous or even harsh to the ears of older composers. Mozart, Schubert, and Sibelius are held up as melody-making geniuses. On the other hand, modernists like Stravinsky wrote melodies—for example, the haunting tune that starts his ballet, Rite of Spring—that many composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and indeed, even some audiences today, would consider unmelodic noise.

Usually melodies are divided into shorter musical units called phrases. These phrases generally end at resting points that are called cadences. Often the phrases that usually comprise the overall structure of a melody give the impression of a question and answer. One part of the melody poses a musical idea, and another completes it. If a phrase ends on a note that indicates an unresolved or incomplete-sounding cadence, the whole phrase is referred to as an antecedent. Likewise, the following phrase with its complete-sounding cadence is referred to as a consequent.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. In the Middle Ages, many composers would often share simple stock melodies such as the fifteenth-century French tune L’homme armé (The Armed Man) as the central themes to their pieces.

2. More modern melodies, like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, have been shared in the same way, but in modern times a much higher premium has been placed on the talent that goes into writing an original melody.

3. The practice of arranging a melody or an entire piece for a large ensemble of different instruments is called orchestration. There are entire conservatory courses dedicated to this subject, and some composers are respected particularly for their ability to orchestrate.

SATURDAY, DAY 6   PHILOSOPHY

Socrates

Widely considered the founder of Western philosophy, Socrates (470–399 BC) never wrote a single book. We know of him only secondhand, from what other people wrote about him.

Born in Athens, Greece, in the fifth century BC, Socrates distinguished himself as a soldier in one of Athens’s many wars, and afterward became a curious figure in Athenian society. He would converse with whomever he could find, especially the young men of the city. Unlike the Sophists—paid teachers who traveled the country teaching young men rhetoric and other political skills—Socrates did not receive payment, and more important, he claimed to have nothing to teach! Socrates said he had no actual knowledge and that if he was wiser than others, it was only because he was aware of his own ignorance.

Most of what we know about Socrates comes from his greatest student, Plato (c.427–347 BC). Many scholars believe that Plato’s earlier dialogues are the most accurate representation of the historical Socrates and the way he treated philosophy. In these dialogues, Socrates typically confronts a fellow Athenian who claims to know something—for instance, the nature of justice. Socrates then proceeds to prove his neighbor does not know what he claims at all.

In 399 BC, Socrates was put on trial for corrupting the youth of Athens with his teachings. At his trial—recorded by Plato in the dialogue Apology—Socrates made his famous claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. He pleaded his innocence, but was convicted. Socrates was put to death by being forced to drink hemlock, a poison. His last hours, spent discussing philosophy with his friends and admirers, are movingly documented in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. The Socratic Method, still used by professors in many law schools, is based on Socrates’ style of aggressively questioning his students.

2. Many of Socrates’s contemporaries remarked on how ugly he was.

3. The comic poet Aristophanes (448–380 BC) pokes fun at Socrates in his play The Clouds.

SUNDAY, DAY 7   RELIGION

Noah

Noah is the remarkable figure in the biblical book of Genesis flood story. According to this story, God surveyed creation and became angry at humankind’s sins. He regretted creating humans and resolved to destroy them all. Before doing so, however, God noticed Noah.

Noah was blameless and God decided to save him from certain destruction. God told Noah that in seven days he would make it rain for forty days and forty nights, causing a great and terrible flood. Noah was instructed to build an ark large enough to hold himself, his wife, his three sons and their wives, and a pair (one male and one female) of every kind of animal that existed. In this way, Noah would be able to replenish the earth.

Noah followed God’s instructions, loading the animals and his family into the ark. After forty days, the rains ended, but the ground was still submerged. In order to determine when the waters had receded, Noah opened a window and sent out a dove.

Finally, after 150 days at sea and another 100 grounded on Mount Ararat, the land was dry enough for Noah to begin the replenishing process. Noah emptied his ark, allowing the animals to mate. God then told Noah that he, too, should be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 8:17). God also promised Noah that he would never again destroy humankind and symbolized this covenant with the appearance of a rainbow.

Christian and Jewish historians and theologians give slightly different interpretations to the Noah story. For Christians, Noah represents an ideal faith in God—marked by trust and obedience and for which Noah and his family were saved. For Jewish interpreters, Noah represents a reluctant faith marked by Noah being one of the last to enter the ark as a sign of reluctance. This suggests his faith may not have been so strong. Despite their differences, both traditions view Noah and the flood as critical expressions of the religious narratives.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. The story of Noah includes the first appearance of wine in the Bible. After the flood, Noah gets drunk and his sons discover him uncovered.

2. God’s command to Noah, Be fruitful and multiply, is also given to Adam and Eve [Genesis 1:28] and Jacob [Genesis 35:11].

WEEK 3

MONDAY, DAY 1 HISTORY

Sparta vs. Athens: The Battle for the Ancient World

Sparta, a small city in the rugged mountains of southern Greece, fielded the most feared military force in the ancient world. Spartan soldiers, hardened by grueling training that began at birth, rarely lost a battle in the bloody conflicts that raged almost constantly between the small city-states of ancient Greece. To build this remarkable army, elders in Sparta tested every newborn for weakness and deformities. Babies deemed unlikely to become strong soldiers were abandoned on a hillside and left to die. For those that passed the test, training was cruel and relentless. The Greek historian and essayist Plutarch wrote that for many of the Spartan soldiers, marching to battle was a relief: For the Spartans, actual war was a holiday compared to their tough training.

The rivalry between militaristic Sparta and its neighbor Athens dominated the history of ancient Greece. Athens, the birthplace of democracy, was a far less rigid society. Unlike Sparta, where there was little time for culture, Athens was home to some of the most extraordinary accomplishments of philosophy, art, and science in human history. The playwrights Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles, as well as philosophers Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates were born in Athens during the city’s golden age in the fifth century BC.

While Athens and Sparta temporarily joined forces to defeat two attempted Persian invasions, they spent much of the classical period competing for the leadership of the ancient Greek world. When the cities fought, as they did repeatedly between about 550 and 350 BC, it was a clash of civilizations in the fullest sense. While Sparta’s famed soldiers held the advantage on land, Athens made up the difference with its sea power. The rivalry came to an abrupt end when Philip of Macedonia invaded from the north. The Greek city-states were swallowed up into the empire that Philip and his son, Alexander the Great, extended over much of Greece and Asia.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Sparta was the capital of the Greek region of Laconia. The word laconic in modern English is derived from the taciturn attitude of hardened Spartan soldiers.

2. To prove their toughness, Spartan boys competed to see how much whipping they could endure.

3. Many of the buildings on the Acropolis in Athens, including the famous Parthenon, were constructed during the city’s golden age in the fifth century BC.

TUESDAY, DAY 2   LITERATURE

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro movement, as it was originally christened, was a flourishing of Black literature and art in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s and early 1930s. The stage for this rebirth was set when millions of newly freed southern Black Americans, after enduring the hardships of slavery and Reconstruction in the 1800s, moved to New York and other northern cities in an exodus known as the Great Migration. By the end of World War I, a poor but culturally vibrant Black community had taken root in Harlem.

Much of the foundation of the Harlem Renaissance was set by the Black historian and social theorist W. E. B. DuBois, famous for his sociological treatise The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and for his role in the founding of the NAACP in 1909. DuBois asserted a new sense of Black cultural consciousness and pride, inspiring a generation of young writers and artists.

One of the leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance was James Weldon Johnson, who penned the novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and the celebrated collection of verse sermons entitled God’s Trombones (1927). Johnson was followed by Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, whose respective novels Passing (1929) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) were among the first critically acclaimed major literary works by Black women.

The Harlem Renaissance produced an especially rich body of poetry. Whereas some of the movement’s poets, such as Countee Cullen, relied on traditional forms, others, such as Langston Hughes, incorporated rhythms from the newly burgeoning genre of jazz music into their works. Such links between the music and literature of the Harlem Renaissance were inextricable, and major figures in the two fields inspired one another throughout the movement.

In the 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance waned as the Great Depression hit the Black community in New York particularly hard. Nonetheless, the new styles and themes pioneered during the era endured, paving the way for Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and others among the new generations of novelists, poets, and playwrights.

ADDITIONAL FACT

1. The Harlem Renaissance era also saw the emergence of a number of notable Black painters, including Palmer Hayden, Lois Mailou Jones, and William H. Johnson.

WEDNESDAY, DAY 3   VISUAL ARTS

The Parthenon

Commissioned by the famous statesman Pericles, the Parthenon was constructed between 447 and 432 BC to celebrate the victory of the Greeks over the Persians. Situated over the site of an earlier temple on the Acropolis in Athens, it was dedicated to Athena Parthenos, the patron deity of the city. The building is one of the most well-preserved Greek temples in existence.

According to the ancient Greek author Plutarch, the Parthenon was built by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates. The thirty-eight-foot effigy inside was created by the classical sculptor Phidias, who also supervised the extensive sculpture of the structure’s exterior.

Ancient Greek temples were generally rectangular and accessible from all sides by stairs. Many, like the Parthenon, had columns that extended around the periphery. When building temples, the Greeks tended to follow the rules of one of three architectural orders—Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian. The orders are easily recognizable by their differing proportions and their capitals—the carved tops of their columns. Unlike most Greek temples that were built according to the rules of one particular order, the Parthenon combined elements of two—the Doric and Ionic. Its architects also made use of optical refinements, that is, slight distortions that enhanced the appearance of the building. For example, the base of the building and the roofline gently bow upward because if they were perfectly straight, the naked eye would perceive them as sagging. Similarly the columns are thicker toward the bottom, a refinement that makes them appear taller to a viewer standing at their base.

Originally, the Parthenon had a wooden ceiling and a tiled roof, and it was painted in bright colors. Square reliefs or metopes ran around the temple above the columns and depicted mythological battles that served as metaphors for the Greek victory over the Persians. A continuous frieze illustrating the annual festival of Athena Parthenos appeared beneath and behind the columns on the four walls of the building itself.

The Parthenon was used as a house of worship for many centuries after the fall of Athens. It was converted into a church in the sixth century, then into a mosque by the Turks who conquered Greece in 1458. During a battle in 1687, a Venetian shell landed on a Turkish powder keg stored in the temple and destroyed much of the building.

In 1801, Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Court in Istanbul, received permission to ship the most well-preserved of the Parthenon’s sculptures to England, where he eventually sold them to the British government. Today they can be seen at the British Museum despite efforts on the part of the Greeks to have the works returned. The temple itself has been visited by countless tourists since the Greeks regained control of Athens in 1832.

THURSDAY, DAY 4   SCIENCE

The Solar System

In grade school, we were taught that the solar system consists of the sun, nine planets, and their moons. It’s not that simple.

No one really knows how many planets there are because the definition of a planet continues to evolve. All astronomers agree upon the validity of the four terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—and the four gaseous giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—but arctic Pluto is a matter of great dispute. In 2006, astronomers reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet.

Pluto is about two-thirds the size of our moon and takes 248 years to orbit the sun. The tiny body of ice travels in a strange elliptical orbit on a different plane than the eight planets. Its coldness, distance from the other planets, and warped path around the sun had led many scientists to believe that it was really a comet in the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy debris on the outskirts of the solar system.

Pluto has a rival on the Kuiper Belt, a hunk of frozen rock originally designated 2003 UB313 and now known as Eris. The object is three times farther from the sun than Pluto and has an even stranger 560-year orbit, tilted 45 degrees off the plane of the rest of the planets. But 2003 UB313 is larger than Pluto, and many scientists felt that if Pluto deserved to be called a planet, then it did, too.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Two other large frozen objects in the Kuiper Belt—Ceres and Makemake—are almost as big as Pluto.

2. Astronomer Michael E. Brown discovered 2003 UB313 and nicknamed it Xena after the TV show starring Lucy Lawless as an ancient Greek warrior princess.

3. Our solar system currently has 158 confirmed moons, and 56 provisional moons.

4. Seven moons in the solar system are larger than Pluto. This includes Jupiter’s Io, which has an atmosphere and active volcanoes.

FRIDAY, DAY 5   MUSIC

Harmony

Music may start with a melody, but harmony is what gives it color. Harmony refers to the sounding of two or more different pitches in unison, but the mechanics of harmony are vast and complicated, and many theorists have spent the better part of their careers analyzing it.

The distance between two notes is referred to as an interval, and intervals are expressed numerically. For example, the distance of five