The word “trivia” is connected to the trivium, i.e., the better-known of the classical liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, and logic). However, there were not just three liberal arts studied way back when, but seven.
The other four were known as the quadrivium, and they overlap nicely with the things I am most interested in: astronomy, music, arithmetic, and geometry. Thus “quadrivial” as my own Twitter handle, as well as the name of this site.
This little historical nugget utterly fails to answer the question in the post’s title. Why? Why am I doing this?
Seriously, why not? Twitter is pretty brief, and too caught up in ephemera (by design). I wanted a space of my own, so here it is. If something I post is of interest to you, that’s awesome; if it’s not, that’s fine too. Life is too short to be able to pay attention to everything all the time.
In the future, I plan on putting stories here, maybe some audio if I can, probably not artwork (I’m a lousy visual artist), but things that I want to think about. And perhaps some music, astronomy, geometry, or even (gasp) rhetoric might slip in here at times. We will have to see about logic.
If you’d like, reach out to me on Twitter “at quadrivial”. Be seeing you.