“What are you being so mean for, miss?” asks Humphrey Bogart’s character in “The African Queen.” “A man takes a drop too much once in a while, it’s only human nature.” Katharine Hepburn’s character ...

There is an old Sanskrit word—sanatan—that translates clumsily into English as "eternal" or "perpetual," but its real meaning runs deeper. It speaks of something that has no beginning and no end, ...