REALITY? & LITERATURE: Making Sense

A mix of thoughts today inspired by Plato’s Socrates, Orwell’s animals, Willie, and the four-year anniversary of the death of my mother; nearly two since my dad’s.

Still sorting through Socrates’ pre-hemlock drinking discussion of the soul in Phaedo. He seems to lean towards reasoning through opposites and assorting by comparisons and contrasts to arrive at his conclusion.  Some good stuff here, and yet I read a bit and ponder for a while before I dare go forth in some state of comprehension, though I’m within the last dozen or so pages.  I’ve finished  Animal Farm, my feelings here are that it does not have the impact for the topic as it would have had back when it was first published.  Mainly because so much has happened in the world of literature that the intrigueing use of an animal society to illuminate not only a Communistic state but the natural tendencies and flaws of mankind is not as powerful a technique.  Not new, of course, as Aesop’s Fables were almost completely based on this.  But more on Animal Farm in a bit.

For me, as these readings come together with this mark of time, I feel again the helplessness I felt after my mother’s death.  It was shamefully beyond the missing of a loved parent, called into being by my father’s questioning of soul.  At the time I was studying Philosophy, and my final paper was titled "Lying to the Dying."  It reflected things I’d told my mother in the hour before she died–whether she could understand me or not–about death.  I told her what I thought she’d need or want to hear.

But after that was worse; my dad’s suddenly voiced concern.  It’s strange, out of the three of us, I was the child who stopped attending church, and yet both parents somehow knew or maybe hoped that I had found a different yet just as firm belief in some God and life hereafter.  What could I tell my father that he could understand without the struggles that I go through now?  He wanted to hear that mom was waiting for him (he said he’d seen her, which drove me nearly insane with curiousity and interest).  Yet I didn’t believe she was.  That is, that she was waiting somewhere up in Heaven waiting for him to join her, even after maybe a brief stint in Catholic Purgatory.  I figured after a certain period of time she was reborn somewhere.  This was not what I told him.  It’s not what I’m ever going to be sure of in this lifetime.  I told him what he wanted me to tell him.

And now, four years later I still wonder:  If she’s not up there somewhere sitting on a cloud hand in hand now with my dad, where is she?  There’d be no purpose to it if they simply stopped being.  Now you see why I didn’t get into a big discussion on the theory of the soul with my father, who was ninety at the time. 

I’m still seeking an answer.