AT THE STOA

The soul to the body is like the captain to a ship: it commandeers the ship.  It is the master of the ship.  It sinks with the ship, after making sure the women and children are safe. Freedom is like a double-edged sword: it  is at once fundamental to human nature and terrible.  It kills enemies when wielded with a sure hand; and makes a bloody good mantelpiece. Words are like pictures to reality.  They represent what is real.  Most of them are tasteless, and some are downright baffling.  This does not prevent them from selling for US$ 44 million. The mind is like a computer.  It is a computing engine, like any Turing Machine.  It can compute your taxes, while managing to purchase every item on the goddamned grocery list. The mind is like an iceberg.  Its unconscious is largely submerged underwater, with only a minimal one-seventh visible.  It is cold, and sometimes striped.  The rarest ones are supposedly flipped and blue. Love is like musical chords: Major. Minor. Sustained

When I was younger and therefore more pretentious, I used to write poems about the sea a lot.  In all probability I may have abused the metaphoricity of all sea-related things - lighthouses, boats, sailors, waves, albatrosses - all standing for one emotional crisis or another. Most of the time I would, like a teenager who doesn't know his Shakespeare (I still don't), fill a card with an obtuse poem about a lone sailor on the sea with stars and whatnot only to guide his way, filled with love and longing for something he knows he cannot have, or even successfully navigate (since the sailor is an idiot).  And most of the time I would get a baffled response along the lines of "If the sea represents me, and the sailor is you... Why is the sailor male?" or something like that.  Which of course begs a lot of questions, the first one being "why use the sea-sailor when mountain-hiker or toaster-bread would just be as inefficient?" There's something about the se