Plato.
(For Paul... if he ever reads this... I was wrong. I've only been blogging for three years. Since April of 2002. Oh well, feels like forever.)
Odessa (the little bugger that I nanny) has gotten to the age (15 months) where she likes to copy people's behaviors. So I was sitting on the couch while she was playing and I was reading Plato's Symposium for Aesthetics class. She decided she wanted to sit next to me and steal Plato and "read" it herself. Keeping her entertained is always more of a priority than homework, so she sat for the last ten minutes I was there just pretending to be me. What a life.
Later in the day, during Aesthetics, we started discussing the speeches in Plato's Symposium. They are all on love - or what the men giving them concieved of love to be. The speech we did in class today I've heard before... the speaker tells a myth to explain love. So here's my best rememberance of the myth:
When the earth was created there was a different kind of human being. This being had four arms and four legs, and two heads... and it's body was perfectly spherical. (Perfect because a sphere in ancient Greece was the symbol of perfection... if that makes sense... cause it doesnt.) Anyway, these round creatures attempted (thinking with the male's head I'm sure) to take over Mount Zion, so Zeus had to punish them. So Zeus cut them in half, making a man and a woman. The story goes on... but in the end the man and women feel incomplete, and are always searching for completion (to make their perfect circle again,) so they search out their "other half." And when they find that "other half" they stay with them for the rest of their lives.
My professor raised these questions in class - "Do we think this is love? Do we believe that there is just one person for us?" I answered that in today's society we would call it finding our soul mate... that one person that is "meant to be" for us. Take for example all of the modern internet dating advertisements that advertise taking a personality profile... to find a connection with another person on the deepest level possible... in our culture, even though we might be hesitant to admit it, finding a "soul mate" is still an ideal.
I finished with my answer and was a bit taken aback when she said that I sounded skeptical. "I might be reading your tone incorrectly," she said, "but I've picked up on a touch of sarcasm in your voice. Do you believe that there is one person for each of us?"
At this moment I had just stuffed a large piece of Milky Way in my mouth (great lunch, Milky Way should take over the Snicker's commercials... if you get my joke...) and all I could mumble was "mmmhm." Not, yes of course. Not no. Not I don't know, because I think I do.
No, I don't think I believe anymore. Love's been boxed up in a closet with the Santa costume and Easter baskets.
When did I become disillusioned with love? When did I stop believing my Prince Charming would one day enter my life and whisk me away on his golden steed? (Or even Richard Gere who would climb the fire-ladder with roses in his teeth to save me from a life of prostitution.)
Yes, there are many stories, commercials, movies, trash romance out there that tries to sell the idea of finding our "true love."
What made us stop wistfully believing and instead quietly jeering?
When we see a "perfect" couple are we jealous because we want that some day, or because we fear we will never have that someday?
