I haven't been able to visit the bookstore this week and bought a new book so I looked at the books I have on my shelf and took one that brings back a lot of memories.
It was start of my freshman year in college when this book was one of the required readings that we had.
Fresh from a highschool run by Benedictine Monks, the extent of the philosophy that I was exposed to was about religious philosophy and dogma.
College was to be my age of Renaissance and this book was the key to unlocking the mind with philosophical ideas.
A history of Philosophy hidden away in a novel. It gives life to Sophie Amundsen, a 14 year old Norwegian and her Philosophy mentor, Alberto Knox.
Athens story begins with the question "Who are you?" It is one of the fundamental questions in Philosophy. the question of who you are and if you truly exist.
I remember my Philosophy professor asking this and going deeper from what is our name and our back ground to who we are in an intrinsic level.
Thus Sophie and the rest of us in class started our Philosophical journey from the Pre-Socrates, existentialism, nihilism, communism and even the creation and Big bang.
How I remember the debates that rang through class as the religious held on to the teachings we had during highschool and those that saw in a different light after being exposed to the thinking of Philosophers.
The allegory of the Cave was one that used by both parties to argue their point of view.
I hold in my hands the very same book that I have first opened back in college and no matter where I go, I always bring it as part of the library that I have in hand.
It is something constant in the world of literature that I carry whenever I move. Now that I have lived here in the same house I have for almost a decade it is a constant fixture.
It is well weathered by age and by countless times that I read it. A portal to a world that passed by and I can only visit through my memories who are becoming more and more dim with age.
I hold on to the book that changed my mindset and my life.