Plato...

I'm reading Sophie's world these days, on the recommendation of my good friend Ooty, and it's every bit an amazing book as he claims it is.

I wanted to talk a bit about platonic ideas, as I find them fascinating. In a nutshell, Plato claimed that there are two types of worlds - the ideal world, where perfect "moulds" for everything exist, and the sensory world, which is everything around us. Basically, the sensory world is based on models from the ideal world, but everything in the sensory world has imperfections.

In the book, the author gives an example of why a child might knock over a sandcastle as soon as she's done building it. The author claims this is so because the real sandcastle that she built is so vastly inferior to the ideal sandcastle in her head.

And that brings me to the beauty of writing and books. When you're curled up in bed with a good book, and the book creates an atmosphere, that ambience is being created in the ideal world in your head, and because of that, the images your mind conjures are as close to perfection as possible. The moods and emotions your imagination weaves have connotations and subtleties that are...well, yours and yours alone. Somebody else reading the same paragraph might have a totally different set of images. Ever see a movie based on a book? Why is it almost always a disappointment? It just never lives up to the ideals in your head. No sir, TV just spoonfeeds you, bite by bite.

The writer kept on mentioning Midsummer Eve, which is a holiday festival in parts of Europe. That reminded of Shakespeare's play...a midsummer's night dream. Just the title itself brought a rush of images, sounds and feelings. I suddenly saw a forest, with fairies tinkling about in the warm air, leaving dazzling sparks in their wake. And then there was this feeling of midsummer...this light, almost festive feeling. Indeed, the world that good writing creates is just so vivid.

I'm trying to get a love of books back. I think I'm succeeding :).