The World of Dr. Justice: First there is a Mountain

Monday, June 22, 2020

First there is a Mountain

The sight of a dog running across the road just in front of the car aroused her from her reverie.

How suddenly, how startlingly it had dashed into the narrow universe of the headlamps! It existed for a fraction of a second, desperately running, and was gone again into the darkness on the other side of the luminous world.

Another dog was suddenly in its place, pursuing …

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p. 79

First there is a mountain; then there is no mountain; then there is.

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About the Author

David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley. He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional works I Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation. He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers. He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.