From the book
Centuries of Meditations
Thomas Traherne · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordTo entertain can mean to receive, accommodate, occupy, or delight someone; entertainment includes the provision offered to a guest or to the mind.
- In TraherneThe natural world entertains the person with prospects, while friendship entertains with divine discourse and heavenly affection.
- In this editionThe meaning must follow the object offered and the recipient’s response; no claim about modern leisure culture is implied by the repeated word.
- A place to beginThe sun illuminates the world and provides prospects that entertain its recipient.
Meaning
To entertain can mean to receive, accommodate, occupy, or delight someone; entertainment includes the provision offered to a guest or to the mind. Amusement is only part of the range.
Use in the book
The natural world entertains the person with prospects, while friendship entertains with divine discourse and heavenly affection. The Cross, too, becomes an entertainment, a deliberately startling description of suffering contemplated as love. Traherne’s hospitality language binds receiving to sustained attention: the soul is welcomed by gifts and in turn makes room for their meaning. Reading the word only as diversion makes its devotional force appear frivolous. Its expansiveness instead allows beauty, conversation, knowledge, and even sorrow understood through love to become nourishment for a receptive person.
Places to read
In this edition
The meaning must follow the object offered and the recipient’s response; no claim about modern leisure culture is implied by the repeated word.