Shepherds with Picnic, by Jacob Wothly and Emile Mangel du Mesnil, c. 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2016.

Energy

Volume XV, Number 2 | winter 2024

Miscellany

John Stow records in his Survey of London that shortly after conquering England in 1066, William I decreed that “in every town and village, a bell should be nightly rung at eight o’clock, and that all people should then put out their fire and candle, and take their rest.” English speakers call such a prohibition a curfew, a word derived from the Anglo-Norman coeverfu, “cover fire.”

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.

—William James, 1902