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Plato and Keats
Oct. 17th, 2009 01:44 amSo.
I really really really want to do NaNoWriMo this year, but this idea has taken hold of me and I'm worried it will be too much/is too pretentious or some such thing.
I was reading Keats (my favorite poet ever!), and looking back at my class notes from last year about Ode on a Grecian Urn. I have to say straight up that I've never quite understood why everyone gets so up-in-arms about the "beauty is truth, truth beauty" line - I may not have, til now, been able to enunciate it well, but it's always seemed pretty clear to me - beauty has to do with seeing the truth in someone/something, and that truth being good and ..well, beautiful. And vice versa - in the truth, the absolute truth of life, is beauty.
And then, literally the next day, we discussed Plato's Republic in Philosophy, and talked about how the Forms of Beauty, Truth, and the Good are all interconnected. How Truth is not about fact but about glimpsing the absolute reality of something. And Beauty has to do in its real Form with catching sight of the truth in someone/something and coming to know them more through that.
And it all connects. Perfectly.
So I want to write a story in which Truth and Beauty are my characters. I really really want it to happen. But it's daunting.
I really really really want to do NaNoWriMo this year, but this idea has taken hold of me and I'm worried it will be too much/is too pretentious or some such thing.
I was reading Keats (my favorite poet ever!), and looking back at my class notes from last year about Ode on a Grecian Urn. I have to say straight up that I've never quite understood why everyone gets so up-in-arms about the "beauty is truth, truth beauty" line - I may not have, til now, been able to enunciate it well, but it's always seemed pretty clear to me - beauty has to do with seeing the truth in someone/something, and that truth being good and ..well, beautiful. And vice versa - in the truth, the absolute truth of life, is beauty.
And then, literally the next day, we discussed Plato's Republic in Philosophy, and talked about how the Forms of Beauty, Truth, and the Good are all interconnected. How Truth is not about fact but about glimpsing the absolute reality of something. And Beauty has to do in its real Form with catching sight of the truth in someone/something and coming to know them more through that.
And it all connects. Perfectly.
So I want to write a story in which Truth and Beauty are my characters. I really really want it to happen. But it's daunting.
