A Wintry Friday Afternoon
Three years ago today in the New York Times:
“The book was Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, and I was 12 or 13 when I carried it home from the library one wintry Friday afternoon.
I cannot even remember the novel that accompanied it. But I remember that I was curled up on our beat-up old couch, the one with the huge embarrassing rip where my older sister would position me to sit demurely, my dress fanned out over the damage, when her dates arrived. I was reading Durant’s section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)
The Forms are abstract but real, I read, graspable only through the eyes of the mind, pure reason. And it seemed to me, that dark winter afternoon as I read, that I was grasping them; that I, a yiddishe maidel of questionable worth, was seeing with the eyes of my mind exactly what that ancient Greek philosopher had seen; that just like him I was out beyond the phantasmagoria, suspended in formal perfection; that I was out beyond myself, had almost lost all touch with who I even was, and it was . . . bliss.”
— Rebecca Goldstein
Related material:
Davenport’s Express.Update of 6:14 PM EST:
Whistle Stop
For the late John Spencer,
actor on NBC’s “West Wing”— “When was the last time
you went to a meeting?”
— “AA?…. What meeting
could I possibly go to?”
— “Mine.”