TIMONAX

What about beautiful people, what about falling in love!

ANTAGORAS

Don’t change the subject.

SOCRATES smiling

He isn’t changing the subject!

PLATO

Well, falling in love! It’s suddenly as if you didn’t exist any more, there’s nothing in the world but the other person, all reality has gone somewhere else, he’s like a god, it’s the most violent experience we ever have –

SOCRATES

A good experience?

PLATO

It can be –

ANTAGORAS

It can be hell.

SOCRATES

Lovers are often jealous and selfish and cruel.

TIMONAX

Usually, in my experience.

PLATO

Yes, like when you want to cage the other person and dominate him and crush him – but I think falling in love is a sort of picture of something good. I mean as if one could love very much but without selfishness.

TIMONAX

Impossible.

SOCRATES

You mean one ought ideally to care for everybody in an unselfish way, even to love them. Perhaps the lover might learn to understand spiritual beauty as the carpenter learns to understand mathematics.

PLATO gradually becoming excited and rising to his feet

We can’t. And yet we can. We can change. You see, love is energy. The soul is a huge vast place, and lots of it is dark, and it’s full of energy and power, and this can be bad, but it can be good, and that’s the work, to change bad energy into good, when we desire good things and are attracted magnetically by them –

ANTAGORAS

I think your magnetic Good isn’t God after all, it’s just sex, all this dark energy is sex.

PLATO

All right, it’s sex, or sex is it – it’s the whole drive of our being and that includes sex.

SOCRATES

Perhaps there is a god there after all. I would call him Eros.

PLATO

Eros! Yes!

SOCRATES

Only your Eros isn’t exactly a god, he’s a holy passionate spirit that seeks for God, what you call Good.

PLATO

Yes! He’s in love with Good!

ANTAGORAS

But your Good is an idea.

SOCRATES

Do sit down, Plato!

PLATO sits

Ideas work in life, they can become incarnate in how we live, that’s how they become real!

ANTAGORAS

These are just attractive metaphors.

PLATO

Metaphors aren’t just ornaments, they’re fundamental modes of knowledge – it’s like – what’s at a higher more difficult level appears to us first as a shadow, or an image – then we break through the image and move on and –

SOCRATES

Like the carpenter learning mathematics. [ Plato nods ] But can we get beyond images and see your Good, which you said was like the sun?

PLATO

I don’t know. In a way, goodness and truth seem to come out of the depths of the soul, and when we really know something we feel we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star. We’re sort of – stretched out – It’s like beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is –