Elvis wrote:I'm still onto this.
Me too. I'm on my umpteenth reading. It's become (and I'm not sure there is a good way to say this) my 'toilet book'. Always there and something to while away the comfort breaks.
I digress, childishly.
It wasn't until I'd read it a few times and come to my own conclusion that I spotted this on page 6 -
"...The truth is so simple, so lovingly simple: if we want to grow up, become true men and women, we have to face death before we die...our Western culture carefully keeps us from such things."
Quite how I'd missed this having 'read' it several times before, I do not know. Oh, yes, I do know - I'm not
very intelligent - that's it, I remember now. (Thanks for the heads up, Dr Evil
note to self - get over it )
Anyhow - that begs the question - how can we face death
before we die? I assume Kingsley is
not suggesting leaping from the path of an oncoming train at the last possible second, or overdosing on drugs that require electrically-induced restarting of a stopped heart.
Language. And in particular -
translation. This is what I'm struggling with. I'm not sure I trust the translation of Parmenides poem.
The meaning of words change over time. I myself have witnessed this - in my early youth, the word 'gay' mean't joyful. It
also meant homosexual, but because we lived in homophobic times back then, 'homo' was more likely to be used than 'gay'.
Then when homosexuality became completely accepted, gay very much meant homosexual and was rarely, if ever, used to describe 'joyful'.
Recently, the word 'gay' (amongst youth culture in the UK) has come to mean 'crap' or 'boring' or generally shite. i.e. "please do the washing up, kids" is greeted with "Dad, don't be gay". It still means 'joyful', it still means 'homosexual' and now it means something else
completely different. All at the same time. I said to my kids - "isn't saying 'don't be gay' pretty offensive to anyone who is gay" and they looked at me like I was a nobhead and said " but it's a completely different word and has nothing to do with gay people".
This is what has happened to one word in the last 50 years. I can't imagine how much has changed
across an entire language in the last two millenium. And even then, that's not taking into account that this has been translated from a
foreign language into English, so the translation is further muddied by close approximation!
And don't even get me started on the 'mind-states' of the ancients. The slavery of 'harvested' African people was a wonderful idea a scant few hundred years ago in Western culture - now it's utterly reviled. Enormous, unfathomable changes must have taken place in mind-states that are literally 'lost in time'.
(Incidentally, there's a fascinating thread raging over at the Graham Hancock site that tangentially touches on some parts of this line of reasoning - it's about the Pyramid Texts, mistaken orthodox Egyptology, 'ramps' debunked etc. I found it a great (ongoing) read - (the part discussing the various ways the ancients may have described television is fabulous)
http://www.grahamhancock.com/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=339981&t=339981)
Yikes, it's 1am here - I'll finish where I was going with this tomorrow. If I can remember where I was going with this.