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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Plato's Cave9/28/2005 22:11:53The man who taught me first to think about the meaning of my existence was a part-time high school teacher I had first when I was fifteen, Ken Knisely. Besides teaching one small class for half a year at the school, Ken produced a wild public access show in which he dressed up in a blue jumpsuit to match his curly hair and beard, engaging professors and thinkers of various sorts on philosophical topics. He also drove a taxi. Toward the end of that first semester of existentialism (he thought it'd be a good think to teach high schoolers), the conversations always drifted to his toddler son, who he'd speak of wiith great love and pleasure. All at once, that class introduced me to the excitement, variety, and mundaneness of philosophical pursuit. Then the other day I got an email from the school saying that he'd died. What his teaching did, in a school system so secularized and dephilosophized as mine, was to induct me properly in the conscious human race. At an age when our world trusts us with nearly nothing, even expecting us to be rebellious and irresponsible, Ken threw difficult texts by great minds about the biggest questions at us anyway and as if to say, congratulations you are alive. He brought us on his TV show and made us talk on camera because he knew that as human beings we must have some truth buried in us. One image that Ken was never quite content to get past was Plato's cave. He loved the thought experiments that brought existence itself into question. What I too easily let myself forget is that this all could actually be nothing just as easily as it is something, an illusion, shadows cast on the wall of another truth. Now I wonder what he thinks. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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