Trivium

Surely some demon must possess the lad, / Who showed more wit than ever school-boy had, / And learned his Trivium thus without the rod; / But Alcuin said it was the grace of God.

As to the nature of his studies, there can be no doubt that he [Dante] went through the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) of the then ordinary university course.

We find in a broad survey of schools in general that there has also been a disposition to develop a special training in thought and expression either in the mother tongue (as in the Roman schools of Latin oratory), or in the culture tongue (as in Roman schools of Greek oratory), and we find the same element in the mediaeval trivium.

The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the freedmen’s sons by Atlanta University.

[…] question of sympathy or antipathy sometimes evoked by a trivium; and in the category of trivia many learned and responsible individuals include Motion Pictures. Only they are not so trivial if we consider the power of feeling evoked by Motion Pictures, and the number of movie-goers.

For the most part, Mrs. Fenner lays stress on the personalities and accomplishments of the executive secretaries, which is as it should be, since these gentlemen remained longer in the center of things than the presidents, who were elected for one year. The style is unpedantic and is flavored with references to colorful trivia, as for example, to the drunken janitor (p. 37) and to the romantic outcomes of NEA conventions (p. 28). Perhaps matrimony is not a trivium.

Smith (Logan Pearpall^([sic])) Junior: First Trivium. I missed the train this morning, of all mornings. […] The usual prizes are offered for a “trivium” (not more than 150 words) in the manner of the late Logan Pearsall Smith, on Gallup Polls.

Harcourt, Brace, and Co.: for an excerpt from Stuart Chase’s The Tyranny of Words; for E. M. Forster’s “My Wood,” in Abinger Harvest; and for a trivium from Logan Pearsall Smith’s All Trivia.

Like so many things in life the calendar can easily be an over-conditioning factor unless one allows the measuring of time to drain away into the silence of a music that tells no time. Whether the year 2001 is referred to as Two-Oh-Oh-One or Twenty-O-One (to avoid the ponderous ‘thousand’ bit), that point of no return will be just another bridge to cross—if and when we come to it—and I imagine the transition will occur quietly without the slightest shudder. In aeons to come the third millennium will end up a trivium among timeless trivia.