Aristotelian spiders

Now Playing: Beethoven's "Symphony No. 7", first movement.

In Honors class today, we were discussing Aristotle's "Poetics", in which he sets out some of his views on what makes a good tragedy, what the characteristics of a good play should be, etc. At the start of the discussion, Whitney and Zoe complained that the "Poetics" is far too rigid and black-and-white. As usual, though, Dr. G managed to work it into the "grey are" (where there are no absolutes) and show that it's not very definitive after all. (I've observed that Dr. G likes absolutes about as much as Zoe and Whitney do, but he's cunning enough always to fit any apparent absolute into the "grey area".)

Anyhow, Dr. G was trying to illustrate the Aristotelian concept of a beginning for us. For Aristotle, a beginning is that which doesn't have an apparent cause but which naturally leads to other events. As he was in the midst of this deep philosophical conjecture, Morgan, sitting near the other end of the table, started to flail her hands wildly. (Morgan is a very blonde girl, in every sense of the word.) This made Dr. G stop. Morgan smacked one of her books onto the table in front of her, and one of her pens flew over her shoulder.

"Now, you see, that's a perfect example of an Aristotelian beginning. Morgan starts flailing her arms for no apparent reason. The flailing of the arms leads to a pen being thrown. It has a natural result."
Morgan looked up sheepishly. "It was a spider. I'm terrified of spiders," she mumbled.
"That had to be the smallest spider I've ever seen!" one of the boys laughed derisively.
"Hey, when I was a kid, I woke up once with a spider on my face, and I couldn't sleep for weeks afterward!" Morgan protested.
"You see, a beginning doesn't have to have an apparent cause, but later, a cause may come out, such as that Morgan is terrified of spiders," Dr. G explained. "And now we see that a beginning leads to natural consequences, including a pen being thrown and a professor blathering on about Aristotelian arachnids."
"The spider just fell out of the air in front of me!" Morgan protested.
"Arachne ex machina," Dr. G sighed, and everyone laughed.
For a while, the class was busy giggling over theories of whether the building was invaded by spiders, and whether an enormous spider was going to jump through the classroom door and eat Morgan.
"They're coming to get me!" Morgan whimpered.
"Ok, ok!" Dr. G said finally. "I will teach, and I will continue to teach, no matter what!"
We all went back to paying attention until later, when another spider appeared crawling on Zoe's notebook. She gently tore a bit of paper off and carried the spider outside.
The discussion flowed on for a while, and we were in the midst of a heated debate over the definition of telos in Aristotle when the classroom door suddenly opened a couple of inches, then silently shut again. Dr. G paused.
Into the silence, I whispered, "It's the big spider!"
Dr. G had a hard time quelling the uproar that followed, I'm afraid.
Rachel grinned at me in complete surprise. "Oh, that was genius!" Whitney chortled, and the boy that had teased Morgan earlier growled in a sinister voice, "Is Morgan here?", impersonating, I suppose, the unseen arachnid, while Morgan sat, trembling, in her chair, and everyone else (including Dr. G) turned pink with laughter.