I hit the books again this week. Yep, that means dusting off those notepads and pulling out the rusty Arabic vocabulary. However, rather than bore you with excruciatingly predictable comments on “the first week of school,” I’ve decided to utilize this moment to bring you a random but fun “school secret.”
I have always been overjoyed at the fact that my name contains the letter “I”. For one little line, it is a remarkable letter! There are endless possibilities in the “dotting” of one’s “I”. I have experimented open-mindedly but usually end up back at the classic "heart" for a dot. If you are wondering what this has to do with the school secret, don’t lose faith yet. For you see, I liked my writing class a lot in Junior High. For several years, we focused on creative writing, which involved tenacious vocabulary expansion. Now I don’t mind telling you I had a fairly good vocabulary. The embarrassing part is that this vocabulary expansion was in part fueled by my desire to find new, exciting words containing plenty of “I’s” for dotting with hearts. Yes, I was known for slipping in an unnecessary use of “ubiquitous” just so I could dot both “I’s” with hearts and make a curvy little “q”. Even in Latin class, I would choose to write sentences with words requiring “I”. This was rather clever of me even though it was pretty dippy. The only problem with my mastermind determination in this area was that Joey figured out what I was doing from the beginning. And he was relentless in his teasing about things such as this. His persistent banter about my strange obsession drove me to give up the quest for “I” words. Thus, if my vocabulary has dwindled from its former mélange of meaningful expressions, I know whom to blame.
So, the school secret of the day is indeed the letter “I,” which has always been the “apple of my ‘I’”—sorry for that rather ridiculous pun, I just couldn’t resist. :-)
In other news, my past two posts appear to have been extremely full of foresight. For you see, this week I was treated to that odious—oh, excuse me. Did I say odious? I meant edible of course . . . wink, wink.—brew which my mother is so very fond of. Yes, the resplendent halls of our villa overflowed with a whiff of broth (note the sarcasm as this broth obviously has no flavor or scent). In any case, I slurped it up like a four-year-old with a slushy.
My post prior to the one on stew also becomes rather ironic given the times. It was, as I am sure you remember, concerned with “The Road to Plato’s Academy”. Well, I have once again departed down this highway of knowledge over the past few days. In my Political and Social Thought class, we are reading none other than Plato’s own little devil, The Republic.
Interesting read altogether, but I am most fervently troubled by Plato’s view of human nature. I seem to have an uncanny knack for finding “human nature” discussion questions. When I brought up the subject in class today, my querulous classmates bemoaned my persistence on the subject, asking if I “try to find human nature problems in everything we read”. I responded that one’s view of human nature is key to one’s worldview. It becomes a question that merits scrutiny no matter what text one is reading. With an apathetic groan, my ever-intrepid classmates acquiesced to my request, and I had my say about what I consider Plato’s huge fault. While he acknowledges that humans are driven by “appetites” and “desires” for unworthy things, he tries to find a remedy within the human saying that each human being contains a “divine spark” of goodness which must be enkindled into a full flame of goodness. In this soul, according to Plato, Reason would rule and all other “desires” would serve Reason.
Now I could go into a loquacious tome on the problems with considering Reason the highest good, but I really must get back to actually reading Plato instead of writing about it, so I will be brief. Can one really suggest that a disillusioned soul (seeking fulfillment of its appetites and desires) would find something better on its own or even within itself??? That is what Plato is suggesting, is it not? That humans have the divine spark (of Reason) within them and that they can enkindle it? While Plato astutely realized the human condition to be plagued by a problem, an imperfection, he couldn’t see beyond the human. He looked for the answer within the human instead of within God. And it just doesn’t work like that.
OK, enough fun for now . . . back to my innumerable readings.
