While reading Symposium one really takes time to reflect upon their previous relationships and look to see if they ever have truly found love in its purist. Many of us can place ourselves along to path to true love, recognizing our past loves as some of the far more sophomoric versions as Plato might see it. When reading the passage, “Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.” I looked back on some of my own relation ships to see weather or not I had seen true beauty (through the Minds Eye) or merely been tricked with aesthetic beauty, lack substance and true virtue to make the love pure. Its painful to say but, I have never even come close. I can recall one of my last serious relationships, she was young and astoundingly beautiful, but that’s where the line was drawn, I was stopped with an image of beauty but not the reality of it. I soon found myself in recognition of her unfortunate qualities. To begin with she was mean, always heated and open to criticize anything that I did. When the strong physical connection and passion would take rest, these ugly qualities would come to the surface. As far as being a lover of wisdom? Well I’d say she was as far away from being that as any, I don’t recall her ever finishing a book that I gave her let alone begin any such book without a great deal of bitching and complaining, and to top it off, with a dagger to the heart of Socrates: I’m fairly sure she once told me, “philosophy is a waste of time, who honestly cares about that?” It was clear to me then, and far more so now that she was defiantly not the one, not my soul-mate and in fact probably incapable of ever becoming worthy of true love.
As this picture - immortalized by film-shows Marylyn Monroe, reading a book upside down but looking beautiful none the less, as does that ex-girlfriend off somewhere appearing to the untrained eye as a prize of beauty, stunning men all around her, but never the less…reading a book upside down.