Save Me from the Horn of the Unicorn
Mandy (I can’t remember her last name) was a bright, perfectly pleasant young woman who insisted that unicorns existed and that her belief in unicorns was neither symbolic nor allegorical but literally factual. I suppose one might say this was a basic abandonment of intellectual responsibility for a person who was, after all, a grad student being trained for a future as an academic. This is true in terms of the socialization of academics. As an academic Mandy is responsible for investigating the assertions she makes. This would involve reading up on the history of unicorns and finding that it was an animal only ever talked about and never actually seen. In the middle ages it was an animal used largely as an allegorical entity to symbolize the Christian mysteries. Of course, for a medieval person the unicorn existed in a kind of dream state or demi-world between the symbolic and literal and depending on context could land on either side. A medieval person did not really need to m...