Introduction to Chapter Two

My first day of class at college was a Tuesday and I had Freshman Seminar. The professor, of all people, was the College President, Leon Botstein (I call him The Bot). We were starting off reading Book I of Plato's Republic.

The Bot walks in late to make an entrance, sporting his trademark bowtie and a hat straight out of the J. Peterman catalogue. He's what Robert Anton Wilson would call "The Cerebrotonic Extreme," or a crazed egghead. He goes around the room sizing everybody up by asking us our names and whether we went to private or public high school.

Then, we open up The Republic. This is the first paragraph:

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my
devotions to the goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would
conduct the festival, since this was its inauguration. I thought the procession
of the citizens very fine, but it was no better than the show made by the
marching of the Thracian contingent.

Wouldn't you know, that was the whole class. Botstein spends the full hour and a half expounding the contents of the first paragraph, waxing philosophic off-the-cuff about Greek culture versus different stages of Christianity.

I don't remember anything he said. But I remember his main, unspoken point: Delve megadeep into every sentence you read. If the first paragraph of a text takes up the whole lesson, you're probably moving at a fair pace.

Which brings me to my own point: The first paragraph in Chapter Two of Prometheus, the quote before Wilson even begins, is enough to write a whole post about. Which I will do either tonight or tomorrow, depending on whether or not I finish writing in time to head out to this alleged party in the subway station tonight.