The Following Story

Yet again I love this book. I was surprised at how much I had forgotten though. It is amazingly dense for a 113 page story. There were notes I took but I would like to follow Sam's lead and blog about something I did not take notes on. So this morning I read without my pen. It took me a while to become alright with it but once I was it was amazingly liberating. Another version of the mysterious mental maneuver, or eternal recurrence, etc... I had to learn how to read again. How to get lost in a story and soar along the pages as if I were being carried by a phoenix over a landscape unfamiliar to me. Safely separate but very close to the story. I read instead of analyzed and it was liberating.

The Following Story, yet again tugged at my heart and stretched my mind. The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Eternal Recurrence theme is painted throughout, several scenes he relives as he is dying throughout the book, the entirety of the novel teaching him how to die and that he will return. His story is not complete, his body through metamorphoses and his soul through continuance, remembrance and forgetfulness. It is the most vibrant part of life, death, as fiction and literature. It is Dolce Domum, as he, by Plato's theory of anamnesis, returns home to "heaven." It is, being only 113 pages long, a 20 minute lifetime. And as we discussed in class, the secret of Immortality is to read, we have had a lifetime in the reading of this book. And finally, The World as Myth and Dream, Socrates had simply dreamt his life. He was so sure there was no afterlife, or immortality of the soul, as he discusses with Lisa d'India, his Creto, on page 91, but in the end he is awakened to his error and moves on to the next world. Poetry.