Death: A Life by Pendle George

Author:Pendle, George [Pendle, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307450081
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-23T05:00:00+00:00

Dominated by Verticality, Ashurnasirpal’s Unique Visual Rhetoric Was Interformative, Transfictive, and Very, Very Painful.

Nevertheless, it was the Greeks who best personified this new age of scientific invention and theoretical research. Nowhere was this more the case than at Plato’s Academy. Plato was the author of a plethora of popular tracts. On the Soul, On Sensation, On Respiration, On Top of Old Smokey, and On and On with Plato had all been bestsellers in both slate and papyrus editions. With the profits he had set up his Academy, a safe haven for the philosophically inclined, whom the general populace thought louche, hairy, and prone to saying awkward things at dinner parties. Indeed, Plato’s belief that it was only through the method of dialectic that pure reason could operate was openly criticized as being “girlie” by the rival monologist school of Isocrates, who propounded the dictum that the only intelligent conversation one could have was with oneself.

The Academy was home to cutting-edge research in every field. Loud explosions could be heard emanating from the school, as the mathematician Archimedes attempted to calculate his law of buoyancy in a lead-lined bathtub buried deep beneath the ground. Similarly the animal psychologist, Aristophanes, accidentally discovered the world’s first joke while inquiring into the hitherto mysterious motivations of pathway-traversing fowl. The results, read out in a paper to the academicians, caused such convulsions (later diagnosed as “laughter” by Hippocrates) that Aristophanes was believed to be a witch and was set on fire.

The philosophers may have thought hard, but they also played hard, and the Academy soon developed a reputation as a wine-soaked party college. Astronomy classes sought to pinpoint those stars that only revealed themselves when the viewer was drunk. Geometry classes attempted to understand the sudden increase in the earth’s revolutions after an amphora of wine had been imbibed, while Ethics classes considered the least offensive places in which to vomit (this was also covered in Retcheric).

The debauched lifestyle of the philosophers enraged prudish Athenian society, and when Philip of Opus, the Academy’s music instructor, composed a groundbreaking new dirge entitled “Fuck the Polis,” battle lines were drawn.

Pericles, himself a great political innovator and the democratically elected dictator for life of Athens, decreed that he would tear down the Academy and construct a giant new building on the site—the Acropolis—which would be open only to idiots and nonthinkers. He even had the Academy’s top sage and mixer of drinks, Socrates, imprisoned and sentenced to death for refusing to empty his mind of all thoughts.

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