Metamorphosis by Polly Morland

Author:Polly Morland [Morland, Polly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782831372
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Way back into antiquity people have been divided as to whether, in an ideal world, it is better to change course or to stick to your guns, whether strength lies in the steadfast oak or the flexible reed, as Aesop framed it.

This was the way the conversation turned late one evening in Athens a couple of centuries after Aesop, sometime in the mid-fourth century BC. Two of Plato’s elder brothers, so the philosopher reports, were at a small after-party following the night-time festival of the goddess Bendis, with its thrilling torch relay on horseback and other diversions. Plato’s brothers were serious-minded fellows – you get these people at parties – and as others lounged and discussed the festivities, they found themselves shooting the breeze with their tutor, Socrates. A disquisition followed on the nature of justice, beauty, education, evil, what the Gods think about and – to our theme – whether they change. In truth it was a somewhat one-sided discussion, which also happens at parties, with Socrates holding forth, his two students merely punctuating with a helpful ‘of course’, a ‘very true’ or an ‘undoubtedly’ here or there. According to Socrates’ way of thinking, which differs from Aesop, ‘things which are at their best are also least liable to be altered’. The principle applies, said he, to furniture, houses and clothes, but also to the ‘bravest and wisest souls’ which are ‘least confused or deranged by any external influence’.

Yet away from Mount Olympus and far from Platonic ideals, the very reverse frequently turns out to be true. Indeed alteration of the soul in the welter of a mortal life is often the very fruit of courage and of growing wisdom, as the tale of Didier Long quietly shows. With a lovely echo of Plato’s revisionist student Aristotle, the American psychologist and pioneer of humanistic psychotherapy Carl Rogers put it like this in his 1961 book about change, Becoming a Person: ‘This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life.’

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