Naivete

I often feel intimidated by you all. Yes, you...my learned classmates. You throw out these huge words that I have to go look up every night, only to forget their meaning the next time I hear them. You read books from authors I haven't even heard mentioned. And you post blog entries that I can barely comprehend.

I believe we are all naive in some regard. My naivete just happens to extend into this degree program. But that's why I'm here. As one of my professors once said, "if you already understood this stuff, you shouldn't be in this class." That thought keeps me going when I want to throw up my hands and say "I'll never catch up."

So here I am writing on a subject in which I am well acquainted. Yet I can't quite figure out what it is that makes us naive. If it truly means a lack of experience or understanding, does that mean that we all of a sudden lose our naivete when we suddenly become learned in a subject? I think, to a certain degree, we're all naive, even in the things we think we know the most about. Perhaps it's when we think we know everything that we become truly naive. That was probably a really naive assertion. Now I've just confused myself.

An Ephesian Tale is a simple one. It follows the archetype of romance literature, in which the man and woman fall in love, are separated, and eventually are united again. It's language is "extremely plain and unadorned" (3). But is it a naive story? A fairytale? Was it told for children? I think I would probably leave some parts out of this story if I was telling it to my son. But I suppose this story is naive compared to the sophisticated tales of later authors. The characters seem fairly one-dimensional. They are hardly ever on the page long enough to develop them. I found myself, at a few points, saying "and then, and then, and then..." It is as if Xenophon was trying to pack as much action into the story as possible without regard to things like suspense. But is this naive? Or were some of the details kept simple, perhaps to allow for easy memory, as this tale was likely told orally.

One of the most glaring problems I found with this story was the role of Eros. He seems to play an important part in the falling in love of Habrocomes and Anthia. Eros supposedly wanted to make Habrocomes suffer. So he set him up to fall in love with Anthia and then devised a way to split them apart. But we never hear from him again. You would think that the story would circle back around to Eros. Perhaps he thought Habrocomes had had enough and decided that he could be reunited with Anthia. But we are left to wonder, without resolution of this character's jealousy and wrath, is it really over? Or is there more in store for these two?