On 30/10/07 04:19, "b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ" <b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ> wrote:
A query: does the pairing of serenity and trinity suggest anything to anyone? I am compiling the next instalments of ADA annotations, to I.28, and wonder why VN's Trinity's Great Court becomes Van's Serenity Court. Googling "serenity trinity" provides the most bizarre conjunctions, beginning with the imaginary queendom of Serenity Trinity, continuing with Serenity Trinity garden plaques for crematoria, and so on, but offering no common thread to their conjunction that I can grasp.
Brian Boyd
Prof. Boyd: some unfiltered reactions:
To most Cantabrigeans, TRINITY does not have its original (1546) theological connotations. Neither do JESUS and CHRIST colleges! They become sort-of everyday toponyms divorced from their roots.
Hence my feeling that any links in VN’s ever-un-obvious mind from Trinity to Serenity (have we dismissed ‘mere’ assonance) may be unrelated to religious matters. Indeed, the Trinitarian doctrine, dangerously rejected as polytheist blasphemy by Isaac Newton, Trinity’s leading light, has a long bloody, distinctly non-serene role in Church history. This path connects Trinity and Serenity but only as ANTONYMS! And even more so, if we recall that the A-bomb test of July 16 1945 was code-named TRINITY.
Then again, mundanely: during VN’s and my residence, the Great Court of Trinity was indeed dripping with the epitome of sereneness! On my last visit, though, tourist-throngs disturbed the peace. Some dared to keep on the grass. Off with their heads!
Stan Kelly-Bootle
PS: Sighted while browsing:
From Trinity College website. VN in good company!
Famous figures associated with Trinity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries include James Clerk Maxwell, author of the theory of electromagnetism; J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford, two of the pioneers of atomic physics; the historian G.M. Trevelyan; philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein; Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India; and the novelist Vladimir Nabokov.