Thug life
Distracted by tiredness and hunger, I just sliced open my pinky finger with a rusty pocket knife. Now I am even more side-tracked. The bandage and tissue are hindering my typing, and the throbbing, blood, and chance of nerve damage are on my mind.
Plato might have nodded knowingly at my preoccupation. In Phaedo and elsewhere, he argued that the body was a danger. The soul has wings, to use his metaphor, but the heavy flesh pulls it down. He was very worried about lust, and recommended celibacy for “self-mastery and inward peace”. But he was more generally concerned about our meat sacks, which threaten to leave our souls “tainted and impure”.
This is perhaps the most: his thinking thing. All else might be doubted, but not the mind doubting. The impression is of a wholly see-through self, burdened with the opaque idiocy of skin and bone.
