This week’s topic – occasioned by a recent evening at a Broadway theater  -- is the (often blurry) boundaries of art.  More specifically, it’s the Broadway musical, a genre notorious for sometimes straddling that boundary. The show in question was a production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The great Stephen Sondheim, whose career began with his lyrics for one of greatest of all musicals, “West Side Story” (1957), with music by Leonard Bernstein. Now that was a work of art. 

Early sailors used maps of the night sky and the known world to find their way, along with other navigational devices: compasses for direction, astrolabes, and later sextants, to determine latitude. While crude or inaccurate by modern standards, those instruments worked well enough for millennia, enabling navigators to guide their ships at sea. (And navigators on American bombers used sextants to cross the Atlantic as recently as World War II). Similarly, the tools of critical inquiry enable us to navigate the natural and symbolic worlds with greater precision and success until better ones come along. And most of the ones we use have served for thousands of years. 

I’ve recently had the pleasure of re-reading two of Plato’s dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Sophist. Reading Plato is always a pleasure. Even when he’s wrong, i.e., when his philosophy is inadequate, he’s never wholly wrong.