Romance, erotic encounters, and fascinating and humorous discussions, can all take place without plan or warning. Isn’t that, after all, our secret hope, each time we set off to visit The Mall? Our trip to the mall might even raise our ethics just a little, and leave us with the distinct promise, that, perhaps after all, not all hope is false, and that maybe not all our efforts are in vain. Ancient Athens’ Marketplace’, the ‘Agora’ was where Plato’s Socrates ‘threshed out the grains of truth from the chaff’, ‘playing ‘mid-wife’ to wisdom’. Today’s ‘Agora’ is ‘The mall’. Like in ancient Athens, this is where people go to shop, to meet people, and just hang around, socialise, and talk, as interlocutors discussing the trivial, along with the more important issues of life. As in ancient times, romance, erotic encounters, and fascinating and humorous discussions, can all take place without plan or warning. Isn’t that, after all, our secret hope, each time we set off to visit The Mall? What we experience at the Mall might even raise our ethics just a little, and leave us with the distinct promise, that, perhaps after all, not all hope is false, and that maybe not all our efforts are in vain.
