Richard Freund Lecture

While at first it didn’t seem that Richard Freund’s lecture on archeology would relate to our class or love and desire in general, this is actually wasn’t the case.  Freund started the lecture with the definition of love, passionate love, and desire.  Love is defined as an emotion of a strong affection and is personal.  Passionate love is defined as it is shown in infatuation as well as romantic love.  Desire is then defined as being like “love” and it is and intellectual and physical concept.  One thing that Freund mentioned is that it is very easy to take an artifact and come up with some ideas and concepts that it represents, but it is much harder to start with a concept such as love and desire and translate them into artifacts.  Something that stuck out to me was when Freund said that in ancient time, people were not supposed to make an image of anything because it was in the commandments and it would be a sin.  I find this interesting because people clearly went against this.  This then leads me to the question: was religion really followed in ancient times or did the religious figure make it appear that it was followed so that we (in current times) would think that it was?  Therefore, should we take religion so seriously if it really wasn’t in the ancient times?  All those questions aside, one thing I find ironic is that desire is so prevalent in ancient artifacts.  The little naked statue of the woman who was put in homes because she represented fertility was a very full and curvaceous woman who had to cover her hair in order to be modest.  I find it ironic that in today’s society it’s a complete and total flip in terms of what we consider to be desirable than what it was in ancient times.  Today a woman must be skinny, have beautiful long hair, and must cover up so that she does not get the reputation of being a “slut”.  Thus, Freund’s statement that “love and desire is in the eye of the beholder” holds very true.  Desire has completely changed from ancient times to now.