teres atque rotundus
-- Horace ('smooth to perfection, to perfection
round')
I saw Eternity the other night
like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
and round beneath it. Time in hours, days years
driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d …
-- Henry Vaughan, “The World”
Could we but fill to harmony, and
dwell
Simple as our thought, and as perfectible,
[…]
Grow to a radiant round love, and
gear
Unfluctuant passion for some perfect sphere.
-- Rupert Brooke, “Thoughts on the
Shape of the Human Body” (1910)
In Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel (1825), Fechner argued that the angels, as the most perfect beings,
must be spherical, since the sphere is the most perfect form.
-- quoted in James R. Newman, ed. World
of Mathematics (1956), p. 1152
We have discussed round squares (which do exist, despite
everything you’ve ever read)
and round cows (which don’t, and more’s the pity)
G.K. Chesterton wrote a whole book about the subject, called
The Ball and the Cross. As
a Christian apologist, he
naturally reveres the Cross, but adds
There
must be some round earth to plant the Cross upon.
He put the case more tartly in Manalive:
“Science!” cried the stranger.
“There is only one good thing science has ever discovered -- a good thing, good
tidings of great joy -- that the world is round.”
It is difficult to find any passus in which round is used in dispraise. The closest we can come is this: Brian Greene, in The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), p. 294, tells us
of “a famously caustic scientist
whose appreciation for symmetry led him to call his colleagues spherical
bastards: because, he
explained, they were bastards any
way you looked at them.” Still, it
sounds nicer than flat bastards.
Why did you do it. And hearts. And why was love so round.
-- J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger
Man (1955)
~
Well-rounded
(character, education) is another sterling term. At the simplest level, it contrasts with Fachidiotie -- Merriam-Webster defines
it using the terms “broad” and “comprehensive”. But there is more to it than that -- more than the idea of a
well-spread smattering,
jack-of-all-trades (and master of none). There is the deeper education that all this learning and
life experience has -- to borrow the language of topology -- rounded ‘round to
form a compact surface. As such, it gains in structural
integrity -- much as a ping-pong ball, though made of inherently thin and
flimsy material, shows great spherical strength.
~
Notions of ‘roundness’ crop up in mathematics as well, well
beyond that of straightforward plane or three-dimensional geometry: for instance, the “unit ball” in a
normed linear space.
The notion is generalized as that of convexity, which has various subtypes, and some surprisingly
complex implications in functional analysis. A lecture at the University of Alberta (Edmonton) in
1982 (Professor Lewis presiding) introduced an especially tasty flavor of this
idea:
Definition: A normed linear space is strictly convex (or ‘rotund’) iff the following holds:
||x|| < 1, ||y|| < 1, => ||(x+y)/2|| < 1
He then added a historical observation:
This sort of thing was introduced
by Clarkson in 1936, with view to
integration theorems for functions from the reals to such a space holding also
for functions from Euclidean space to such a space. Community interest switched to linear operators beginning
around World War II; and this
remained the case until the late 1960s.
Now we’re back to rotundity.
~
We leave the last word to C.S. Lewis (English Literature
in the Sixteenth Century, 1944):
"Columbus, a man of lofty
mind, with missionary and scientific interests, had the original idea of acting
on the age-old doctrine of the earth's rotundity,
and sailing west to find the east ..."
[Update] We
still leave the last word to CSL, but from a different work, discussing
medieval cosmology, and its explanation for the ‘natural’ orbiting-patterns of
the celestial bodies:
A modern may ask why a love for God should lead to perpetual rotation. [It
is because] the nearest approach to His eternal imobility, is eternal regular
movement in the most perfect figure … the circle.
-- C.S. Lewis, Studies in
Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966), p. 51
Does not Saint Thomas remark somewhere, that the most perfect shape,
beneath the moon, is the belly of a penguin? (One feels sure that he did; yet I cannot at
present lay my hand upon the
passage.)
~
Further kudos to rotundity:
Dieser rasche Rundgang durch
Schuchardt’s mehr als 50 Jähre umspannende Wirksamkeit zeigt, daß wir es tatsächlich
mit einer in sich geschlossenen, “runden” Lehre zu tun haben:
das Bild des Kreises scheint mir am ehesten geeignet, Schuchardt’s
Gedankenweben zu versinnbildlichen.
Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo
Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2nd edn. 1928), p. 6
~
Anyone who is up for 'another round', can find more here:
.
.
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