The idea for The Erasmus Pages came to me as I was attending a class in teaching English as a second language. One of the instructor techniques discussed was to ask students to keep a journal in which they wrote down anything they read that caused them to see more, feel more, and understand more than what the words implied, and to record what these sentences meant to them as readers. Throughout the school year, this journal became more than just an assignment book of meaningful selections and insights, but a collection of signposts along the path of learning – and falling in love with – the English language.  

The Erasmus Pages will become such a collection. Not of pithy phrases and well-worn expressions that have been the source of a dozen different memes over last several years, but contemporary words that surprise the mind with their freshness or those written half a millennia ago that resound with new clarity. I do not seek enlightenment here. No nirvana waits at the end of the perfectly structured sentence; but the possibility of drowning, delightfully and without reservation, in an endless ocean of words carefully chosen, beautifully written…that, yes that paradise, exists.

                Come with me, PJ

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

Born: October 27 or 28, 1466-1469, Rotterdam or Gouda, Netherlands

Died: July 12, 1536, Basel (or Basle), Switzerland

      Desiderius Erasmus sought the truth in layers of language all his life, but his earliest years are shrouded in mystery. More...

 

To Desiderius, Who Always Knew, a poem by PJ Braley

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