Learning other people, that’s much harder. What’s easiest is – is beauty – when you see beautiful things and just want them to exist outside, in themselves, so that you can love them and understand them. Beauty is a clue, it’s the nearest thing, it’s the only spiritual thing we love by instinct –

ANTAGORAS

What’s all this got to do with religion?

PLATO

It is religion and it’s happening all the time. If it’s not everywhere, in the air we breathe, it isn’t what I mean. If it’s something whose non–existence is possible it isn’t what I mean! It’s to do with life being a whole and not a lot of random choices. Religion must be proved by the whole of life, it isn’t a sort of oddity or side issue or one choice among others, it isn’t weird like magic. If it’s anything it must be everything, it must be proved by loving people and learning things and looking at things. It’s not abstract, it’s all here. It’s not retiring from the world, it’s knowing the world, the real world, this world as it really is, in all its – details –

TIMONAX

You mean everything, bits of hair, and mud, and dirt, and fleas and – ?

PLATO [ after a moment ] Yes.

SOCRATES

But what about this ‘learning other people’, which is so difficult, and so important?

PLATO

Yes, we seem to be naturally good about beauty and bad about people

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