![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I don't have the drugs to sort it out
Jan. 26th, 2015 05:09 am"Health and sickness -- the suffering self, in all its varied permutations -- is an enduring human concern. The evidence, and our theoretical models, imposes its own necessary limitations on what we may know about life, health, sickness, suffering, and death in the ancient Greek world, but while the past may be a foreign place, where "they do things differently," it is not so foreign as to be unrecognisably human. When we reduce the human dimension of history to plans and outlines and a sterile recapitulation of facts or surmises -- when we elide the sweaty, painful, messy, squishy, essential complicated meatiness of the sense-experience that makes up the human perceptual world -- we do both it and ourselves a disservice. "The dead were and are not," as G.M. Trevelyan once wrote. "Yet they were once as real as we." Investigating the experiential dimension of ancient practices, particularly when those practices are bound up with universal human concerns, gives us the tools to bring us closer to the reality of those dead generations, and to see how they are -- and are not -- just like us."
Look on my final paragraph, Ye Mighty, and despair. Is it not a thing of horrible beauty? Gnarled and twisted and OH SO DONE WITH THIS NOW PLEASE CAN I BE REALLY DONE?
