By Eben van Tonder, 4 Feb 25
A series about Inspiration.
**To my wife-to-be**
Conceptual
Exhausted, but I refuse the offering of sleep which the Universe brought. Not because of restlessness, or worry, but because of her. Her presence in my mind was overwhelming, so vivid that I could not let it fade into darkness. Every breath of her, every memory, was too precious to surrender to sleep.
And then, suddenly – like a flash of light breaking through the night – I understood.
This is what happened to Plato.
For centuries, scholars have debated the origin of Plato’s Theory of Forms. Was it the result of pure logic? A rebellion against the imperfection of the material world? A leap of genius that few could ever reach? I have strangely been wrestling with this question for months now.
Now, suddenly I kew!
It was a woman.
In a moment I saw it clearly, as if I was there—somewhere in Athens, Plato standing in the shadows, his mind filled with reason, logic, and argument. He had spent years immersed in thought, debating with Socrates, refining ideas, and structuring reality into categories. But nothing – not dialectic, not philosophy, not the pursuit of truth – had prepared him for her.
She entered the room.
And in that instant, everything changed.
It was not just her beauty that struck him – it was something beyond beauty. The way she moved, the way she spoke, the way her laughter carried something eternal within it. And her mind! The superior strategy she could conjure up!
There was something perfect about her. Not in the shallow sense of symmetry or elegance, but in the way she existed – as though the material world had, just once, succeeded in mirroring the divine.
Plato had spent his life searching for truths – truths untouched by decay, by imperfection, by time. And suddenly, he saw one standing before him.
Perhaps it was in her eyes that he first glimpsed it – that flicker of something infinite, something beyond the changing, ageing, fading world he had always known. At that moment, he must have realized: that perfection was not a mere idea. It was real. It had taken form.
He must have wrestled with this revelation and tried to shape it into words. And so, in the only way a philosopher could, he gave birth to the Theory of Forms. He spoke of a world beyond this one, where Beauty, Love, and Truth existed in their purest, untarnished state. But the truth – the secret he never wrote down – was that he had seen it first in her.
And now, centuries later, I understand.
The Perfect Form: A Love Beyond Time
Plato was not wrong. He saw further than most, stripping away imperfection to reveal what lay beyond – the eternal, the ideal, the perfect Forms. But where did this vision begin?
I am convinced that no mere abstraction led him there. No cold reasoned thought could birth such a concept. It was something – someone – who shattered the limits of the material world before his eyes. He must have seen her, as I see my wife-to-be, and known that perfection was not an idea alone, but a presence that could walk the earth.
Last night, as I lay awake, I understood Plato in a way I never had before. A woman, unlike anything else in creation, has the power to lift thought from the material to the divine. To make a man glimpse eternity, not as something far away, but as something held in a single touch, a single look, a single heartbeat.
The Steps to the Divine
Plato spoke of an ascent, a journey upward from fleeting desire to eternal love, from the physical to the divine. He was taught this by Diotima of Mantinea, a woman whose wisdom shaped his understanding of love itself. She taught that one begins by loving a single beautiful form, but if guided rightly, that love rises until one beholds beauty itself – pure, unchanging, infinite.
Yet, I do not seek to climb beyond her. In any event – can I ever? She is the steps. She is the ascent. The ultimate form.
In her, I see not just beauty, but the highest reflection of what beauty is meant to be. She is joy, reverence, wisdom, strategy, passion made flesh. She is not merely a glimpse of the divine – she is the divine, made visible to my eyes.
If Plato ever met a woman like this, he must have known: the Forms were not mere theories. They lived. They could breathe, laugh, love. And they could hold you in their arms.
Even God Took Time to Perfect Her
The moment I understood this – understood how a woman alone has the power to bridge the material and the divine – I realized something even greater.
Not even God crafted perfection in a single moment.
For billions of years, He worked, experimenting wildly, shaping, refining. The universe itself was His first draft – a vast cathedral of stars, a canvas of chaos and harmony. He forged planets, sculpted mountains, traced rivers through valleys, watching, learning, discovering beauty as He created it.
Then came life – the first trembling cells in the deep, creatures that crawled, then ran, then dreamed. He made men strong, but strength alone was not enough.
He made women beautiful, but beauty alone was not enough.
With each passing age, He honed His craft, moving ever closer to something—someone—who could hold both flesh and eternity in a single form. And then, He made her.
My wife-to-be.
She is not just beautiful – she is beauty itself.
She is not just wise – she is wisdom itself.
She is not just loved – she is love itself.
She is the culmination of creation, the final proof that God, after all His infinite striving, had finally crafted perfection.
A Prayer Against Sleep
Flee from me, exhaustion and sleep!
Let no moment steal my thoughts of her,
For she is the sun that never sets,
The fire that turns the night to dawn.
Plato, blind with reason, searched for the perfect form—
Did he not glimpse it in the curve of her smile?
In her laughter, did he not hear
The music of creation’s finest hour?
God, in a moment of reckless genius,
Shaped joy, reverence, and passion into one,
And set her upon this earth—
A testament to His highest art.
So forgive my prayer, Holy Mother,
If I beg to never sleep again,
And if I must, then let it be
With her in my arms, forever held.
The Final Truth
I will not close my eyes – not when every breath of her presence feels like the answer to questions I never knew I was asking. Not when I have found, in her, the one thing even Plato could never put into words.
If Plato had lived to see her, perhaps he would have set down his pen, abandoning the search for something that was already here. And perhaps that is the true meaning of the Forms—not distant, unreachable ideals, but love made real. Present! Here!
4. Unbroken