There; have now provided Mr Marvolo with perhaps more detail than he was expecting in answer to his entirely perceptive and insightful question, tidied up a few more loose ends of correspondence, and am once more at your disposal.
On my mind, as I prepare my lecture on history that must, by its very nature, touch some on what the people of the time believed, and motivated by the central theological question of the age: the first line of the Gospel according to John, as we have received it handed down to us: ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. Rendered most often in English since the days of King John's translators as "in the beginning was the Word", but the word used in Greek for 'Word' is, to my ear, best rendered not as 'word' but as Story, in Platonic form. After all, what is history but understanding the stories each group of people have told themselves? A little bit of narrative awareness can go quite a long way in one's life. To be human is to be a storytelling animal, searching for meaning and pattern amongst a sea of interconnected events. The question of individual stories is subsumed in the nature of Story, and we are left to try to find meaning in the pages of our lives.
As we are speaking hypothetically and literarily, I suppose the questions we readers (those of us who are so drawn to stories) must ask include whether our heroine is much surprised by her revelations, and whether her realisations are supported by the text. And if they are -- which I believe them to be -- then the nature of Story must dictate they were there all along, and she was simply not conscious of the hallmarks and harbingers she was seeing.
Does that help you, in your deconstruction of the text? It is an ancient enough story, and one that has been told thousands of times before -- but of course, each iteration has the capacity to be young again, and new.
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Re: Private message to Antosha
Date: 2012-10-08 03:16 am (UTC)There; have now provided Mr Marvolo with perhaps more detail than he was expecting in answer to his entirely perceptive and insightful question, tidied up a few more loose ends of correspondence, and am once more at your disposal.
On my mind, as I prepare my lecture on history that must, by its very nature, touch some on what the people of the time believed, and motivated by the central theological question of the age: the first line of the Gospel according to John, as we have received it handed down to us: ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. Rendered most often in English since the days of King John's translators as "in the beginning was the Word", but the word used in Greek for 'Word' is, to my ear, best rendered not as 'word' but as Story, in Platonic form. After all, what is history but understanding the stories each group of people have told themselves? A little bit of narrative awareness can go quite a long way in one's life. To be human is to be a storytelling animal, searching for meaning and pattern amongst a sea of interconnected events. The question of individual stories is subsumed in the nature of Story, and we are left to try to find meaning in the pages of our lives.
As we are speaking hypothetically and literarily, I suppose the questions we readers (those of us who are so drawn to stories) must ask include whether our heroine is much surprised by her revelations, and whether her realisations are supported by the text. And if they are -- which I believe them to be -- then the nature of Story must dictate they were there all along, and she was simply not conscious of the hallmarks and harbingers she was seeing.
Does that help you, in your deconstruction of the text? It is an ancient enough story, and one that has been told thousands of times before -- but of course, each iteration has the capacity to be young again, and new.
Philosophically,
T