Okay, gang, I'll get this started with a small thing I noticed, about the questioners.
Almitra is, of course, the only one given a name. Most of the other chapters are given over to a character defined only by his (or, rarely, her) profession. I was interested in the few chapters given over to generic "man" or "woman": unidentified women asked about Children, Joy and Sorrow, and Pain, while an unidentified man asked about Self-Knowledge. I actually discount the On Children woman in this discussion, because she's identified as a mother and lord knows that was/is considered a female profession.
So! Did the women not get titles like "priestess" in these cases because there just weren't job titles enough that women were considered able to fill? Or is it supposed to be woman's lot to care about sorrow and pain, but man's lot to care about self-knowledge? Luckily you can make the argument that many of the profession-identified questioners are gender-neutral, or you'd be getting a big heap o' commentary about patriarchy and misogyny right about now.
And then there's Almitra herself. She opens the chapters on Love, Marriage, Reason & Passion, and Death. It's sort of a fun exercise to go through her chapters, and her appeal to the prophet in the first chapter, and pull out all the love-related terms. In her first speech, you've got "longing," "desires," "love," and "needs," as well as the somewhat loaded phrasing of "our children." I imagine it's not a great leap to say she's supposed to represent a sort of Mary Magdalene lover-of-the-prophet thing, but that makes her question about Death even more interesting.
And as much as On Marriage reads like a Dear Almitra letter ("I love you, babe, but I've gotta be free..."), it's also interesting to compare his emphasis on individuality in that chapter with his declarations that so many other "dual" things are unified--life and death are one, sorrow and joy are one...plus, he's advocating all this socialist sort of "we are all one people" business in On Giving, On Buying and Selling, On Crime and Punishment, and probably elsewhere--and yet, the lovers are separate.
Anyway! That's just the first few bits I've been thinking about. What did you guys think?
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2 comments:
You people are lame. So lame, in fact, that I'm now going to comment on my own post.
I've been reconsidering the whole duality vs. individualism thing. And I wonder if we can say that, for example in the Sorrow and Joy chapter, the Prophet is pointing out the duality of normally singular aspects of existence, and his chapter on Marriage is similarly highlighting the dual, and therefore separate, roles of married folks. Blah.
I agree that Almitra is carrying the Prophet's love-child.
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