The discussion of Plato's Symposium was, for me, a low point.
Nothing novel here.
Trying to be positive: some true things about love were said here, but nothing
earth-shaking.
By contrast, I feel in reading Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness", that I am challenged.
What is this between Tereza and Tomas? Is it so simple as to say it can't be love
because Tomas is unfaithful? Well, I do think that would be too simple...
In his narrator's voice, Kundera says something like this: from the chance
event of their meeting, and the blend of events, she came to love him,
and this set in motion a source of energy that lasted her entire life.....
Have also been reading Keith Oatley's "Best Laid Schemes."
As I had supposedly studied Homer once upon a time it is humbling to
read Oatley's speculations....in Chapter Five (drawing upon Bruno Snell)...
The heroes of the "Illiad", he suggests, don't have an inner life as do those
in "Middlemarch". Makes me want to re-read the Illiad.
But emotions as eruptions, disturbances.. . not planned...Now here's something which,
I suppose, Solomon doesn't really like. But I'll have to read more to be sure.
Actually, what Oatley is doing is even more interesting because he wants both that
emotions are eruptive and that they are decisive about our happiness, our relationships
to others. But he formulates it something like this; given that our plans our flawed,
both because they needn't match reality, and because a partner in a joint project will
have a different plan, where can we turn for guidance? Oatley's answer seems to be George Eliot's: we turn to emotions....
It's not just that emotions help us run away from bears. They even help us with issues and problems which are existential....
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