“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
– John Milton, Areopagitica
Rhoda has a voracious and insatiable passion for reading and writing, as evinced by her creation of “The Conch,” which, among her other quixotic dreams, she hopes to one day turn into an august blog. Some of the wordsmiths she lionizes are Ayn Rand, J.R.R. Tolkien, H. L. Mencken, John Updike, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thucydides, Homer, Herman Melville, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, W. Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, Henry David Thoreau, John Steinbeck, Maya Angelou, Jack Kerouac, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and, most of all, the Bard of Avon. Rhoda’s life is variegated by means of the following activities: biking, listening to Chopin and Vivaldi, entombing herself in a veritable mountain of books, dozing during downpours, singing in a histrionic falsetto, immersing herself in the (art) history of a cultural mosaic, debating the Obama Administration’s policy agenda, lobbying her hamlet to make the environment more sustainable, quizzing her clement comrades on recondite trivia, designing an automaton responsive to human gesticulations, graffiting her books with pink annotations, lacquering her nails in iridescent mauve, updating her journal and sketchbook, tempering her mania for the Riemann Hypothesis to match the abstemiousness of her diet, watching Jeopardy! and documentaries, picking up new languages, cracking crossword clues in the obscure realm of a dimly lit subway car where time and place evanesce as muted memories, assimilating the contents of The New York Times and meditating to the cadence of waves.
A white conch symbolizes telluric hegemony. The white right-spiraling conch shell is an old Indian symbol of the noble gods, whose grand conch-shell trumpets promulgated their triumph in war. Early Buddhism designated the Vedic conch as a supernal symbol of the proclamation of the Buddha’s pedagogy as well as a feminine symbol. The conch is said to be the voice of Buddha preaching the Law. In Islam, the conch symbolizes regard for the Word. In Exploring World Art, Andrea P. A. Belloli writes, “Conch trumpet music is supposed to have special qualities that make it highly appropriate within a monastery: like the sound of a bell or drum, it is said to drive away evil spirits, and – according to one Tibetan master – to carry the message of Buddhism to awaken monks from the sleep of ignorance.” Annabeth Headrick’s The Teotihuacan Trinity mentions that “In Prehispanic Mesoamerica, conch shells were important musical instruments that were blown to announce the presence of the gods.”
