Reading English Books Together

Are marriages made in heaven or do you have to put in a great deal of effort to make your relationship work? What is the basis of a happy marriage? Leo Tolstoy wrote:  “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.” Problems are bound to confront you but your mutual readiness to handle both an apparently insurmountable difficulty and a minor snag will eventually bring you long-awaited harmony and you will join the ranks of happy families who are ‘all alike’, according to Tolstoy, because a happy marriage is a flawless marriage with every single problem solved and settled. The basis of a happy marriage… Can we use ‘base’ instead of ‘basis’? A language purist, who has very strong ideas about what is correct or acceptable, would say: ‘Definitely not! ‘Base’ is physical. You use ‘base’ to describe the lowest part of a column or a staircase. You can make a cocktail with a whiskey base and murderesses in crime...

For most of us happiness is the overriding aim in life but there is one formidable obstacle to achieving it – few of us have a clear CONCEPTION of what happiness is. For Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher, there was an inextricable link between a person’s well-being and knowledge.  You can become truly happy once you have rationally examined every aspect of your life and made sense of the world you live in. Socrates is supposed to have said: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. Rational examination of your life is all about CONCEPTS. For example, you have chosen the career of a judge in the hope of promoting justice. Whether your decisions as a judge will make you happy or not will hinge on how clearly you have formulated the CONCEPT of justice. However, the answer to the question ‘What is justice?’ may elude you. What method did Socrates suggest for defining CONCEPTS ? Socrates’s mother was a midwife – she helped women to give birth to babies. Socrates comp...