Kin Selection Begs to Differ
YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE, MY EVERLASTING LIGHT
Sophia: Plato, John, I have been pondering the fragility and grandeur of human experience. Can we reconcile the fleeting nature of life with the longing for lasting beauty?
Plato: (calm, deliberate) Sophia, the answer begins with perspective. No human thing is of serious importance. The desires, the sorrows, the triumphs of men and women — they flicker like candles in the wind. What endures is the Forms, the eternal truth behind appearances.
Keats: (softly, with a wistful smile) And yet, in the transient world, a single thing of beauty can anchor the soul. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Even if life is ephemeral, beauty allows us to touch something everlasting, a light that persists despite the shadows.
No human thing is of serious importance.
— Plato (429?–347 B.C.E.)
Sophia: So, Plato, you urge detachment from the ephemeral, while John, you see eternity in the delicate, the earthly manifestation of beauty. How do we reconcile these visions?
Plato: By recognizing that beauty itself is but a reflection of the eternal Forms. The joy Keats speaks of points beyond itself — it is a reminder, a mirror of truth, not truth itself.
Keats: Precisely, but I also believe in feeling the joy fully, in letting it warm the heart. Even if the object fades, the memory and its illumination endure. In that sense, beauty becomes eternal in our experience.
Sophia: Then perhaps the light we seek — our everlasting sunshine — is both beyond and within. Beyond in the eternal Forms, and within in the joy that a beautiful moment or vision leaves upon the soul.
Plato: Indeed. We must look past the fleeting human concerns and direct our gaze toward the eternal. Only then does our light cease to flicker.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
— John Keats (1795-1821)
Keats: And yet, Sophia, I say do not scorn the flicker. Let it shine as it may. The sun can be glimpsed even in the shadows, and each glimpse is enough to make the heart sing.
Sophia: So the everlasting light is both wisdom and wonder: a contemplation of the eternal, and a gratitude for the fleeting beauty we are allowed to witness. The sun that rises within us, though it shines through the ephemeral, is enough to illuminate all.
Plato: Then in humility, we embrace the eternal.
Keats: And in joy, we celebrate the temporal.
Sophia: Together, they become one — reason and feeling, eternity and fleetingness. You are my sunshine, my everlasting light — not despite impermanence, but because it lets the light shine at all.
The three sit in quiet reflection, the eternal and the fleeting entwined, like sunlight glancing off rippling water — a reminder that light, once seen, never fully leaves us.
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Heraclitus
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