The Walking Sepulchre

[monk222]

Plato calls up a lot of mythology and writes of supernatural realms, but he strikes the humanist note so well that the modern reader happily embraces it as poetic, as when Plato writes in "Phaedrus" of the time before we lost our wings and fell to earth to become men:

Whole were we who celebrated that festival, unspotted by all the evils which awaited in the time to come, and whole and unspotted and changeless and serene were the objects revealed to us in the light of that mystic vision. Pure was the light and pure were we from the pollution of the walking sepulchre which we call a body, to which we are bound like an oyster to its shell.

How can I not appreciate that tragic sense of life? And, in Milton, I find myself a bit invested in the mythic idea of a lost paradise. And I sort of want to believe.