A Piece of Street Wisdom; D. Williams

John K. Williams A Piece of Street Wisdom One of the illusions of our age is that wisdom is most likely to be found in the writings of the learned and the deliberations of academia. That this belief is an illusion is demonstrated if, in imagination, we take a tour of Athens as it was in the fifth century B.C. Scholars we can find aplenty. The historian Thucydides is penning a volume which, he claims, "is not ... designed to meet the taste of an im mediate. public, but [to] last for ever."! The philosopher Socrates is raising questions destined to haunt the human mind for millennia. The dramatist Sophocles is writing plays which audiences, in the year 1985 A.D., will still find awesome. Yet in the streets of Athens ordiThe Reverend Doctor John K. Williams has been a teacher and currently does freelance writing and lecturing from his base In North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 484 nary people are doing what ordinary people ever have done and ever will do. They haggle in the market, dis cuss the weather, and make wagers on sporting events. They boast of their triumphs, lament their trage dies, and devise their schemes. They tell one another jokes and pass on the latest gossip. Occasionally they spice their conversations with snippets of street wisdom, quoting proverbs they drank in with their mothers' milk.