When we were commuting together ~15 years ago, my carpoolmate Charlie had a stoical way to handle the inevitable traffic jams. As we approached the first chokepoint on our route and saw the thicket of cars lined up to merge ahead of us he would calmly announce: "Station Number One". After working our way through that, racing a couple more miles at speed, then encountering the next slowdown, Charles-Auguste would solemnly declare: "Station Number Two". And so forth and so on, as we crawled the Washington DC Beltway toward home.

I've belatedly figured out what he was alluding to (maybe!): the Catholic Church's Stations of the Cross. And reading about that ritual led me back to a Victorian name that I met long ago: John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), author of one version of the Stations as well as lectures and articles including The Idea of a University. That extended essay in turn contains Newman's "Definition of a Gentleman" — a musing which impressed me enough that in 1996 I typed it into one of my web pages (http://www.his.com/~z/gentleman.html ). Small world ...

(see Cardinal Newman (4 Oct 2001), ...)

TopicPersonalHistory - TopicFaith - 2003-02-27

(correlates: GatherScatter, 2008-06-18 - Kensington Wheaton Silgo Loop, InexhaustibleIntrigue, ...)