Sophie and the Sin of Athenian Idealatry

"Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

Rosemarie Urquico

An excerpt from the essay reply to Charles Warnke's You Should Date An Illiterate Girl. I like both pieces.

There is a girl I'm in love with, and her name is... let us call her Sophie. Sophie is perfect, and embodies every quality - rare or otherwise - that I admire in a girl. She's about 5'1" of perky impishness and dimpled smiles, and she wears her hair in that pixie-cut chic I adore oh-so very much. But these are merely the frosting, and not the cake.

The thing about Sophie is that she is a prolific and voracious reader of books. All books. From autobiographies to bildungsromans, historical fiction to sci-fi, and the highest to the lowest order of fantasies. She reads them all no matter if its written by the Brothers Grimm or the Sisters Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe or Ishiguro Kazuo, G. K. Chesterton or Sidney Sheldon. She had been there and back again, into the wardrobe and down the rabbit hole. She had beheld Dorian Gray's portrait in its various stages of decomposition, walked away from Omelas and witnessed the passion of the Nazerene. She always carries a paperback in her handbag, several volumes of audiobooks loaded into her MP3 player, and a thousand more in her Kindle just in case  because she thinks that there is no worthier pursuit to fill the intermissions of her life than ink in its myriad forms. She had visited worlds beyond ours, and lived more lifetimes than the single one helping we are allowed. I want to reminisce with her these places we have been to, these lives we have led. I want to sit across from her as she swims between the pages of a new novel, and I in mine. I'll steal glances at her. I'll watch as as her eyes brighten and her breath halts - and then she'll break surface for a moment just to read to me a line or a passage which excites her, touches her or simply blows her mind out of the water.

As she consumes pages and proses, she also crafts them. She's working on a novel and holds the ideas of several hundred more in the bookshelves of her mind. She could think of no higher calling than to leave at least one of them behind before the light of her consciousness goes out, and no higher honour than having it considered worthy enough to be catalogued in the sum total of humanity's bibliography - a sentiment I share with every fibre of my existence. She understands the crippling paralysis of the writer's block, and the pure joy of finding the perfect words, the bon mots, in expressing precisely what she means to say. She also writes a blog and record every opinion and emotion which inhabit her psyche, and document every worthwhile experience of her beautiful life - because every life interpreted through the lens of carefully-considered, heartfelt words is more splendiferous than one which meanders unlettered. A writer is an uncommon creature which does not merely think, but thinks also about thinking. I cannot identify with those who only wade in their stream of consciousness but never stood at the banks to watch it flow, taking notes of its liquid form, its ripples, its waves. Most of all, I want a lover whose mind I can read.

Sophie is intelligent and loves the accretion of knowledge for its own sake. She believes in the silent power of knowing how things work around, above and inside us. I like it that she comprehends the concept of falsifiability, delights in the fact that dinosaurs still exists today and often on our dinner plates, and knows that the Dirac Sea is not a body of water. I like it that I can argue with her about gravity; on the plausibility of gravitons as predicted by the quantum field theory versus the geometric elegance of Einstein's general relativity. I enjoy our coffee talks where we discuss comparative theology, debate on the merits of Kantian ethics, and wrestle with the Platonic Theory of Forms (which we refer to as the Hylaean Theoric World because we have both read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and loved it). I recognise in her my intellectual equal, and if you lived a life surrounded by simple people and simple conversations you would celebrate this discovery too. It's like she's at just the right height to dance with. Or to kiss.

There are so many women who walked by me without so much as leaving a faint footprint in their passage through my life - faces without names that I shared a seat with on buses and trains, drift past as I stroll down a street or in a mall, or sat across from in a café or a library on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Behind one of these faces is Sophie.

Oh, if only I know which!

Forgive me, Sophie. Forgive me O Future Lover for I have sinned against you. I am a daydreamer, a hopeless romantic and an idealator of the worst degree. And I am in love with the idea of you.

Romanticidal maniac,

k0k s3n w4i