About

Very well, if I’m going to start inviting the world at large to visit this blog I guess I ought to say something about myself on it.

Not too much, because visitors who already know me already know me, and if anyone else wanders in I’m more interested in sharing with them my thoughts about other things, than in sharing info about myself.

So: I am 55 years old, a resident of the Boston area, an active member of the First Church in Boston (Unitarian Universalist), a Sanskritist and dabbler in dead languages generally, (living ones too but they have a habit of talking back,) with interests in world history, politics, religion and philosophy. I am very fond of classical music; also science fiction, which I have often toyed with the idea of trying to write.

Enough of this, OK?

Oh yes, the name. It’s a Greek word meaning “born elsewhere, alien,” and the Gnostics used it – e.g., in one of the Nag Hammadi texts – to express their idea that our essential self, the salvageable divine spark of being within us is fundamentally alien to the phenomenal world.