TUESDAY.
Comparing Eden and Hesiod's Golden Age. Commonalities: bounty, no pain, no materialist concerns, peaceful, no need for purpose; limited companionship, man cast out to suffer or man descended to the Iron Age of suffering.
Differences: A garden (planned, shaped) -- the world (as found); death present but easeful--no death until transgressions, then labor and suffering; lots of company; temptation in Eden, none in Golden Age (Hesiod does not tell us how humans have come to their degenerate state).
The Big Question: Why do the gods bother? Why do they invent free will & make it possible to choose pain?

WEDNESDAY:
= To make intellectual growth, we need to explore, to read more widely than the assigned work, and to think beyond the class period. Look around! What do you make of these ideas?
= The difference between a utopian idea and a community lies in the necessity of accounting for differences in individuals. Good communities have something they share; they agree on goals. They need diversity in order to make progress; they need to adjust to changing conditions. Communities need a government: for protection of individual rights, protection from the outside, as a role model for behavior; to keep order and manage consequences of bad behavior (the mosaic law, "and eye for an eye..." is about tempering responses to hurt).

THURSDAY:
Vergil's Eclogue 4 (a short, pastoral poem), which describes the Golden Age and contrasts it with the world as Vergil found it. A short lecture on the importance of looking up words you do not know and pursuing the topics we study beyond the boundaries of the reading assignments. The Question of the Day: Why would someone like Vergil, or anyone for that matter, bother to write such in such an obviously fantastic manner? Some ideas: what we can imagine we want; mental play & imagination have their own pleasures; if your life is terrible, it is helpful to imagine something better; it's the human thing to want more and better.

FRIDAY:
"Big Rock Candy Mountain" and the American Cockaigne. What is rock candy? What are the circumstances the singer finds himself in? What do we want in our lives that supplies up purely with physical pleasure?