Here is another crumb removed from a work in progress, but one perhaps worth sharing nonetheless. Long-distance relationships don’t always work, but long-distance perspectives are often useful for art and science:

Besides, “we are better able,” says Aristotle, “to contemplate our neighbors than ourselves, and their actions than our own,” (Nico. Ethics 09.09). This might even be one reason why Plato chose to write the final words of Socrates within the context of a conversation between two people outside of Athens rather than two members of the jury who sentenced him.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1934) (IX, ix) p. 559; Plato, Phaedo 57a in The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, (New York: Penguin, 1993) p. 109.