I took a trip to Florida in early December as a kind of family vacation. The weather was perfectly balmy and the trip would have been totally relaxed if it weren't for the terror that is air travel. The plane trip isn't too bad, but getting in and out of the airport is nightmarish. I remember entering those ominous sliding doors, and I felt that I was no longer in America, rather, I felt that I entered some feudal fiefdom where one's humanity is confiscated. As I went through the rigamarole of the airport, I finally came upon the TSA line, which seemed to stretch all the way to the Atlantic ocean. I wasn't board however, because I had brought not one, but two different books with me. You might find the titles to be the epitome of irony for this situation: they were Animal Farm by George Orwell and Plato's Apology.
Can you picture me siting in a long line of people waiting to go through airport security with a copy of Animal Farm in my hands? You might as well show up to an Atheist convention with a Bible! Doubtless everyone thought that I had it as some kind of assigned reading, but with me that is rarely the case. I was reading it because it is a fundamentally important book to read and I don't need anyone tell me to do when I can tell myself. So there I was in line reading about how this farmyard monarchy was overthrown and converted into a democracy ran by the animals, And as I read, I discovered how the animals lost their freedoms and landed once more under tyranny. How did this happen? It was a bad chemistry of many things. What I consider to be the foremost causations is that none among the beasts had private property, no one did anything unless they were told to, and (except for the pigs and dogs) they were all clownishly illiterate. A word to the wise: If you are not in control of your own things, and you are not the master in your own house, and you can't read a book without the supervision of a teacher, than don't be throwing off the light ropes of monarchy for the heavy chains of communism!
I read Animal Farm on the way to Florida and I read Plato's Apology on the way back home. This book was equally incongruous for my setting as I waited in the line to go back home. As I waited for my rights to be trampled on, I read about how Socrates had his rights ground into the dirt as he was set on trial and executed because he exercised liberty to speak an unpopular truth. His inequitable demise originated in Socrates hearing a strange prophecy from the Delphian Oracle. The Oracle had told him that he was the wisest man alive. Socrates, skeptical of this pronouncement set himself on a quest to discover what the Oracle meant and whether it was true. He spoke to artisans, doctors, lawyers, kings, and wiremen to discover if they were wiser than he. What he found was that all these types of people had deep wells of knowledge on many things, but these men claimed to have more knowledge than they actually did. Socrates at length, concluded that he was wiser than they because he was able to truthfully discriminate between the things he did know, and the things he was ignorant of. The undiplomatic Socrates told these men the hard truth: that they were grandiose fools! Powerful men do not like to be criticized, so they metaphorically stoned the prophet and passed the death sentence on him. A month later, Socrates was forced to take his own life by ingesting poison.
I only narrowly captured the meaning of these books here, a taste test if you would. These two books are profound classics that everyone should read, and if possible, read them in an airport as that type of a setting will make their significance that much more relatable. Perhaps all books should be read in their appropriate settings: Les Miserables should be read in a slum, Don Quixote should be read in a prison, Moby Dick should be read at sea, and Tom Sawer should be read on a steam boat. I know by experience that reading a book in a dramatic setting can make the book that much more thrilling.
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