There's an echo in here

I didn’t know Plato personally. Nor did I ever engage with him intellectually. We had mutual friends, running buddies who overlapped during those wild Athenian nights. A time when the life of the mind was all that mattered. That and good olives. The Ancient Greeks sure loved to party though. Thinking takes its toll on a being. They’d spend all day pondering essential existential questions and by sunset need a break, dying to turn their brain off and carouse. There weren’t many options back then for brainless activity. This was before Rome’s dominion, before Stvdio LIV. There just weren’t that many places to come together for a free exchange of grapes and ideas. Hemlock as a mixer never really caught on either. But you can’t say they didn’t try.  

Plato, like many philosophers in those days, overlooked the beardless as mental lightweights. Dismissing them for their lack of facial follicles. Bristling at sorry excuses for stubble. To a man with that much hair, each curl was tantamount to a groundbreaking concept. To have a beard was the closest equivalent of getting a masters. People get masters degrees nowadays so they can force their academic foils to call them “master” or “maestro.” We can't all be doctors, now can we? What I’m saying is that Plato would fit right in among the hirsute hordes of present day Kings County, New York. If only bicycles were more of a thing in Ancient Greece. While the Greeks imagined many future developments, from democracies to salads, one thing they could never conceive of were bike lanes. You need more consistent paving for that.

From what I have gleaned over many years cursorily scanning Platonic verses, was that as much as he loved friendship, the man had a real thing against caves. He wanted people to leave them. This I don’t understand. Caves are great hiding places. They provide refuge during cataclysms. Bomb shelters before the invention of bombs. They’re cozy. Okay, so there’s not much in terms of natural light inside a cave – either the beer or the light. But the former could stay cold inside, recalling the tricky time pre-fridge. There could be snakes, bears and other mysterious interlopers. Nothing a flashlight can't help identify and scare off.

And most of all, caves have echoes. Echo chambers, derided and dismissed by

generations of thought-leaders and thought-alecks, are nonetheless helpful when seeking clear feedback. Frequent complaints when under stress or under a cacophonous neighbor involve the inability to hear yourself think. In an echo chamber, that’s all you can hear.

Listen to your echo. Listen to yourself. You might actually like what you hear.