Berkeley and I Origins

Sophie’s World Reaction: 

This far into the reading I really started to question everyone’s sanity; Sophie’s for allowing herself to be swept away by an elderly man she really knows nothing about, Alberto for his suspicious slip-ups and acceptance of strange circumstances, and even myself for getting tangled in this mess alongside with the characters and truthfully caring too much about the story. The chapter on Berkeley confused me so much I was borderline annoyed. I’d like to say I’ve reached a point where I now expect the unexpected but I’d be lying. I’ve gone past that point of expecting the unexpected and have now moved onto not expecting anything at all. That’s not to say I don’t think the book will go anywhere anymore, I know the book will take serious dives and sharp turns here and there, I just stopped trying to guess what will happen next. This way I won’t stress myself out when I guess something wrong or completely out of line thought most of the time I feel like it’s not me who’s out of line but the book. Soon after seeing the message ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HILDE!’ on the banner flown around by the plane, Alberto almost unwillingly explained to Sophie his growing suspicion that Hilde’s father is a “‘will or spirit’ that is the ‘cause of everything in everything’”, in not so many words; God. It irked me that Alberto seemed to know almost nothing of Hilde’s father at that moment when I was lead onto believe that Alberto knew many things about Hilde’s father. Here I was reading this book thinking that my mind was being framed to doubt everything and not to jump to conclusions yet Alberto throws theories my way of Gods and Angels in the form of Hilde and her father. I know it never said in the book word for word to think of Hilde and her father as just mortal beings very similar to myself, but I felt as though I was almost guided away from thinking of them as angels and Gods. Alberto always acted as though he knew more than Sophie did about Hilde’s father, as though Hilde’s father wasn’t all that special and so I too believed Alberto. I was thrown aback when Alberto told Sophie that he ‘knew along’ that her name wasn’t really Sophie, that it was Hilde, and much like Sophie I was (not for the first time) beginning to question Alberto’s sanity and wondering if all this time Sophie was taking lessons from a delusional. Again when Hermes seemed to speak to her as she was leaving the apartment and Sophie randomly finding her mom on the street while an ominous storm was berating down from the clouds, I was left speechless and utterly lost. 

Real Life Connection:

Spinoza was a confusing chapter for me to get through. I’m still not sure I understand it completely. One of the concepts that was brought up was the ‘perspective of eternity.’ I’m not sure I completely understand what this whole perspective is just yet. A sentence that stood out to me was Alberto’s question to Sophie: “Can you perceive all of nature at one time-the whole universe, in fact-at a single glance?” Sophie replied with a much more confident answer, “I doubt it,” she said when I would have replied “hell to-the-know, I don’t even know what you’re asking me.” Something wouldn’t let me move on from that sentence, something that I was just on the edge of remembering but couldn’t quiet grasp yet. That’s when a quote from a movie I had watched just a few days prior hit me. The movie was called I Origins, a dramatic science fiction film that followed a scientist whose beliefs were turned upside down when his lover dies and possible signs of rebirth began to reveal themselves. When he first met his lover she asked him: “Do you know the story of the Phasianidae? It’s a bird that experiences all of time in one instant. And this bird, when she meets the love of her life, is both happy and sad. Happy because she sees that, for him, it is the beginning, and sad because she knows it is already over.” I’m not sure how well this quote ties into Spinoza’s perspective of eternity but I’m hoping it can give me a small sense of what Spinoza was talking about. Spinoza tried to present the idea that everything and everyone is a part of something much larger than ourselves and that we can only create small ripple effects if anything. If I take the idea of the Phasianidae and associate the bird with God, I can start to get the sense that to her, nothing humans can do or experience may be infinite. Only to her can the true perspective of eternity be felt and understood.