Scenes and Portraits

A thoughtful meditation on the human impulse to name and categorize, this work opens with a lively discussion of everything from Maori greenstone clubs to the tangled semantics of 19th‑century critics. By juxtaposing scholarly rigor with witty anecdotes, the author invites listeners to consider how language both clarifies and obscures the world around us.

The narrative then wanders through the debates surrounding Renan, Euripides, and the broader clash between rigid dogma and open‑ended doubt. With a tonal blend of erudition and humour, it explores two opposing “religions” of belief: the everyday communion with nature and the philosophical agnosticism of thinkers like Protagoras and Montaigne. Listeners will find a richly textured essay that celebrates curiosity while warning against the comforts of easy categorisation.