Know thyself. It was what came to mind in the wake of Donald Trump’s
victory and my own puzzling reaction to it. And while that familiar
phrase just popped into my head, I had no idea it was so ancient, or
Greek, or for that matter a Delphic maxim inscribed in the forecourt of
the Temple of Apollo according to the Greek writer Pausanias (whom I’d
never heard of until I read his name in Wikipedia). Think of that as my
own triple helix of ignorance extending back to... well, my birth in a
very different America 72 years ago.
