Pandora’s Box

One of my students brought up the legend of Pandora’s Box in a recent class in the sense of learning about something you’ll only regret knowing. For example would you want to know if your spouse was cheating on you? Since this happened at the end of class, we didn’t really get to dig into the idea too much. One thing I might do when/if we get back to the subject is talk about myths and how you can read different things into them. So in my version of the Pandora story, I’ll remove the hope angle and the box will keep getting bigger the longer it stays shut. So by opening the box Pandora did us all a favor, because if it had stayed closed the evils within it would only have gotten worse.

Hey, if reclaiming mythology to construct an idiosyncratic personal moral philosophy was good enough for Robert Graves, why shouldn’t we all feel free to do the same?