On books that change your life

"I really should have read Plato's Republic in college, like everyone else," I told Larry, the other night. "It seems impossible to comment on it without feeling sophomoric."

"You wouldn't have understood it in college," Larry replied, "the way you do now."

I'm not sure about that – I was a fairly clever college student – but what astonishes me about this text is how succinctly it anticipated so many of our current conversations.

For example –

and this is just one example –

They discuss whether consent should be obtained by both parties before entering into any interaction associated with love; they also ask whether consent should be publicly litigated so that we might know who is guilty if an interaction goes beyond its predetermined boundaries.

(It's worth noting that they were referring exclusively to homosexual activity in this case, since heterosexual activity had its own set of rules and regulations.)

They discuss whether it is best to be vegetarian, and whether it is possible to be communist in the original sense of the term – the baker baking for all and the shoemaker making for all and so on – and then they start getting into whether we should ban all stories that might contain ideas we do not want people to consider, especially if those people are children, and whether we should ban popular music with its new and bewildering harmonies because "any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited."

And I'm not even halfway through, but I'm starting to get the sense of where this is going, because I've gotten to the part where Socrates implies that the most important thing a person can learn is how to handle complexity without disintegration.

(He never quite states this outright, just like he never quite states that God is the mathematical universe and the gods are the stories we tell to understand ourselves.)

This, by the way, is how Socrates defines justice, after explaining to everyone that no, justice doesn't really mean punishing your enemies, why did you ever think that, justice means – well, I'm just going to have to quote it in full:

But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others,—he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals—when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair of politics or private business; always thinking and calling that which preserves and co-operates with this harmonious condition, just and good action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action, and the opinion which presides over it ignorance.

And for some reason justice is the most important thing to these Athenians, I don't know how it was structured in the original Greek and I don't know how close this word is to our idea of integration, and yet in our Unitarian Church where I have recently become an organist we say "May your mind be open to new learning. May your lips bring truth into the world. May your heart know love and your hands do the work of justice, as you go your way in peace," and I can get behind that if I gloss it as "may your hands do the work of the integrated self," I guess I was thinking that we were supposed to go out and retribute or something, and honestly I'd rather not.

Because I have work to do –

Real work –

Which Socrates seems to be implying is the most important thing a person can do.

Without real work, he tells his Athenians, the mind has nothing to do but think about itself. This leads to an unnecessary concern for one's status, since one has no other way of demonstrating self-worth, which in turn leads to anything that advertises an improvement in status. Hypochondria, for example, or fanaticism.

Or – and I bet you didn't think I was going to veer in this direction when I started this post – the decision to sign up for a class that promises to change your life by helping you write a bestselling novel.