IMPRESSIONS AND CONVENTION

How did we come up with this?  Once when we were boys, the distinctions were made easier by birthright. Advances in literature, the arts and sciences were the prerogative of the Church or Monarch according to the convention extant. When reason entered the picture it made a mess of rank and privilege.  All so simple, everyone knew his place. And then great thoughts became shared. Mankind became literate in fits and spurts but gained enough traction to unpack classical studies. Bloody Renaissance. Damnable Enlightenment. Reformation and Counter Reformation be damned.  Life was so simple until reason itself was validated. Always, along the way were men of discerning ability able to articulate their presence of mind.  Not much different than today, when you think about it. Except we have ignored equality for women as the good little chauvinists we were.  So many men conventional and otherwise became drawn together, in an assembly of Brotherhood that cultivated an exchange of ideas. As if time would never stand still, knowing well the timelessness of the quest for truth would spring from the hearts of men forever and a day, fed by fact nurtured with imagination, with the bravery of a young boy whistling bravely and loudly as he crept into the night, crossing by the village graveyard.  Trace back to the names of those men who risked change- Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Homer, Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Socrates, now names that drip understanding, in an eclipse of imagination the forerunners of the global community, hundreds of years before the first space travellers photographed the blue sphere floating in a vast dark vacuum defining mankind as a singularity, existing on the fringes. Passing one to the next, secrets as hidden as the geometry of a wave, the physics of a  star, the truth of a poet. We were unapologetically given an opportunity to understand ethics as well as apply them to our daily life. Discuss.