Plato and the Eternal Return

I've been thinking about Plato's idea that we already know everything that there is to know. We just have to remember it. What if that were true? What would happen if we didn't learn everything in our first life? Would we come back much like in buddhism where people are always trying to achieve nirvana and those that do not coem back until they do? That would certainly help us to learn, and it would also connect us to another concept of the class, the myth of the eternal return. We are in a cycle of return that would only end once we find a way to remember all that we had forgotten.

If anyone has any thoughts please feel free to comment.

Sympsoium Thoughts

I found it interesting that the original meaning of the word Symposium and that which we use today are two entirely different things. In Plato's day, a symposium was a drinking party. People just sat around consuming more and more alcohol until they probably couldn't hold it any longer.

I thought this was extremely funny considering the fact that we now use the word symposium much as Plato depicts the one in his story. Simply put, we expect to learn in a rather casual environment from multiple speakers, often on a broad subject that can have many interpretations.

Imagine how startled many of todays "symposium goers" would be if they went to one only to find all the other people drunk. Imagine also how startled Plato and Socrates would be going to a symposium to find that there was no intention of drinking there.

Both parties might even be outraged, and it might even be the stuff of comic legend.

Thoughts on Antigone

Having recently finished Antigone, I thought that I would put some thoughts down about the play that came to mind while reading the introduction. The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that there would have been only three actors for the entire play, all of them male. It seems odd that, according to Woodruff, Haemon, Antigone, and Ismene, would have most likely been voiced by the same guy especially since they sometimes appear on the stage together. I can't even imagine seeing one man switching back and forth between two different masks when Antigone and Ismene are disputing over whether or not to bury Polyneices.

I'm also stuck on the fact that all these actors would have been men. I just keep seeing this one big, brawney guy switching back and forth between two different masks trying to change the tone of his false setto in order to engrose the audience. Living in this time period we could easily get the full effect of the play with a half dozen well trained actors, but I wonder what it would look like to watch this play in the ancient times.

Childhood pets

I've had many pets over the years, and yet I can still remember all of their names. I see each of them in my mind's eye as I write this, and perhaps none of them is more cherished than Montana. Those before her were my parents pets, never mine, and so I did not feel much of a connection to them when they died. I was far too young anyway. Montana was differnet though, she was mine, and the day she died was one of the saddest of my life.

I remember the first moment I saw her. I was a small 3 year old child and she was an even smaller puppy amongst a dozen other puppies in a small house that I cannot recall a single detail of, but I can remember seeing Montana. A long story short, we took her home and spent the next eleven years together.

I remeber the night before she died. It was cold and I was getting ready for bed. I heard her bark and thought something might be wrong, but she was quiet almost instantly and so I thought nothing about it.

The next morning, a cold November morning by Alabama standards, I went out to feed her before going to school. There was a small, old barn where she would often sleep at night and so I thought nothing of it to check and see if she was sleeping, and sure enough there she was, but this time she did not wake up when I called her name, and, as I touched her, softly at first but then with more force as if pleading with her to get up, I knew she would never wake up again.

A Question of Time

I think it is interesting that ours is a culture that deals with time in such a linear sense. Some argue that it is our more wordly nature that makes us so inclined to see time in a straight line, that if we were more religious, our sense of time would be more circular.

I disagree with this belief. I think that even before we became a world of science, there was a sense of an end. After all, the calendar that we use today was developed by the church. It is meant to count to the end of days, and only a linear culture can have an end. I think that it is very interesting that we do not have a more cyclical calendar. Most people that I know would prefer the thought of a continual return to the same thing. Why shouldn't they? What is there to look forward to if everthing ends?

In fact, throughout history, people have sought to find ways to beat what they saw as the passing of time from alchemists attempting to find an elixir of life to the conquistador and explorer Juan Ponce de Leon looking for the fountain of youth in America. With a circular calendar, it becomes less pressing of a matter to survive eternally because that is essentially what you will do. Perhaps then, we should change our calendar so that it no longer includes years that continually get larger. Instead we should look to create a calendar that allows for the return of all things and by that become a less fast paced culture and more pressed with doing things right.