Our future goals—for our career, for our physical fitness, for anything—are our "aspirations." This word, which literally means "a breathing toward," has an murky connection with its dominant modern meaning of a "desire for our future." These tenuous links still can still help us appreciate the notion of aspiration as it appears in Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Method of Nature, his 1841 meditation on the paradoxical tension between individual ambition and grand historical narrative.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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The word "utopia" was invented in 1516 by Sir Thomas More for his book of the same name. But a utopia seems to draw from two separate Greek notions: a "non-existent place" and a "good place." In today's episode, we consider the confused origins of "utopia," and we consider the word's appearance in the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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When someone is a "patient," that person is, in one sense, weakened by an affliction but also, in another, powerfully enduring it. There's a paradox behind the idea of "patience," and in this episode we consider how this English word confronts this very tension. Finally, we consider a brief poem by the reclusive author Emily Dickinson, whose bracing images remind us that strength can sometimes hide under a veneer of vulnerability.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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In our previous episode, we considered how the Greek vocabulary for "feeling" developed into our contemporary language of "aesthetics." Today, we look at the similar terminology of "sensing" in Latin, which eventually evolved into the English word "sentiment." Interestingly, these similar ancient terms become rather different ideas in English. As a reflection on the roots of our own sentiments, we look to Adam Smith, whose 1776 work The Wealth of Nations tells us not just about economic growth but the judgments we develop through and from our daily labors.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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Ancient philosophical thought retains an enormous influence on our own contemporary worldview. Today's word—"aesthetic"—draws from that very tradition. We might think of "aesthetics" as a branch of philosophy concerned with the evaluation of art, and even more fundamentally, the word itself raises important questions about what we know anything and how we can know it. To help us think through these difficult philosophical problems, we consider a passage from Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans and its criticism of twentieth-century social scientists.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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The Greeks and Romans have left behind so much: not just literature, but roads, vases, statues, and buildings. In today's episode, we use this "material culture" of the ancient world as an entry point for thinking about the word "opulent," which itself draws on a multiple words from Latin. To think through the notion of opulence, both ancient and modern, we consider a passage from Joan Didion's seminal collection of essays, The White Album.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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Pyramids are part of global architectural culture. We find pyramid-like structures in Egypt, Mexico, and in many other places. But the word "pyramid" itself comes from Ancient Greek—or perhaps it does. The etymology of "pyramid" is a bit of an unsolved linguistic riddle, and in today's episode we consider some possible origins. We also look to a famous passage from Horace, the poet of Augustan Rome, who hopes that his own literary legacy will outlast such great architectural monuments.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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We all plan for the future we want, even knowing that the best laid plans of mice and men can go awry. When we try to look ahead and make the best choices, we exercise a kind of "providence," at least according to the etymological roots of this word. In today's episode, we consider the notion of providence and its close relation to "prudence." We also look to John Milton's Paradise Lost, whose final lines draw out some rich moral paradoxes about human freedom.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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