Commentary
There’s a famous story about the 11th-century King Canute of England, who, while in front of his courtiers, commanded the tides to stop—and yet, they kept on rolling. This likely apocryphal anecdote is generally misrepresented as illustrating the monarch’s presumptuous folly in thinking his writ could control the elements, but, in fact, it proved exactly the opposite: There are some things beyond the powers of secular authority, Mother Nature among them.
