not old body parts: craggy eyebrows, gray hair, beard, failing eyes, not dusty books: shakespeare, socrates, aurelius, arendt, not words: erudite, precocious, sagacity, percipence, not education: cambridge, oxford, harvard, princeton, not military: combat, boot camp, target practice, bombing, not politics: president, judge, senator, prime minister, not bragging: instagram, birkin bag, nantucket house, porsche panamera, but rather: nameless nature, lakes, oceans, trees, mountains, timeless, perhaps one day dead, but still wiser than….
Tag: Socrates
21st Century Greek Scholar
when studying the ancient greeks there are rules: the oracle knows, socrates questions, plato governs, and aristotle examines nature. when trying to be esoteric, mention more details: delphi, the agora, the republic, syllogism. and if that still doesn’t work, forget alexander the great’s library, dusty old books, like the histories of herodotus, instead, go to wikipedia and pretend.
Modern Homework
Sitting with my daughter and her iPad, we
fill in boxes that pose questions about
Greek Civilization. Art = statues, writing=
Plato, upper classes made laws, were
citizens, slaves did what they were told to
do. Box after box on the screen, covering
500 BC to 146 BC, until Rome conquers
Athens. Less than memorization, we cut and
paste words from other screens into hers. I
imagine Socrates in the agora, watching us,
wondering what happened, how we stopped
interrogating the machine, our flesh fingers,
puppets, moved to reduce everything to this.
Daniel W. Polk 