Up@dawn 2.0 (blogger)

Delight Springs

Friday, September 24, 2021

Searching for Plato With My 7-Year-Old

In Athens with his daughter, Thomas Chatterton Williams could finally pay homage in person to the classical education his own father gave him.

When my father was a small boy in Galveston, Texas, with no siblings to play with or anything like a helicopter parent regimenting his time, he roamed the inscrutable world of adults all around him. On one such sortie, rummaging behind his neighbor's property, he found a neglected box of books, the names of which he recalls to this day with awe and precision. The first and most important was Will Durant's 1926 classic, "The Story of Philosophy." In its pages, he was immediately drawn to an image of Socrates, whose features reminded him of his grandmother's pig. Far from repulsed, he lingered on the image, longing to comprehend why this funny-looking man who never wrote a word was revered throughout the ages...

nyt

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