Pilgrim in the Palace of Words. Glenn Dixon
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Название: Pilgrim in the Palace of Words
Автор: Glenn Dixon
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Путеводители
isbn: 9781770705784
isbn:
The above, though, isn’t what I intended to write about. I meant to fashion the old German woman into a modern-day Oracle. I meant to dig up some more on Jimi Hendrix. I meant to go drinking in the Mermaid Tavern, but somehow my thoughts on that beach diverted me and I found myself wading through a deeper history.
Napoleon lost the stone to the British, and they carried it off to London to the confines of the British Museum. I touched it once, this magical Rosetta stone, a gesture very much like blasphemy to a museum curator. Strange, actually, because moments later an urgent siren wailed, and a legion of uniformed guards swept into the large room out of nowhere.
They didn’t head directly for me, though surely the colour of my face had blanched into a pale and guilty white. No, they herded everyone into a group and pushed us out an unmarked door. One minute I was brushing my hand against the Rosseta stone and the next I was standing in a parking lot. What really happened is that someone had phoned in a bomb scare. Obviously, the guards were used to such eventualities and were highly trained. Rightly so, because in a place like the British Museum, a repository of the world’s greatest treasures, the damage an explosion would cause would be a blow against all of humanity.
In any event, through Greek we know the ancients. Those who could write Greek began to record everything. Much of the Bible has come to us through Greek. So have our first solid glimpses of science, medicine, and philosophy. From Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom, we have the first intimations of what we would become.
From Crete I sailed to the Cycladic Islands. Dolphins danced in the ship’s wake, and in a few hours’ time we were under the cliffs of Santorini, the first of the islands. Everyone aboard moved outside to stand at the railings and gawk. Santorini is spectacular. The cliffs rise five hundred metres straight out of the water, and at their very top, miraculously clinging to the rocks, is the whitewashed town of Thera.
The ferry pulled into a little port at the base of the cliffs. We poured onto a bus that then laboured up a switchbacking road. Up and up we went in the swaying bus, stopping sometimes to reverse when a truck rumbled down the other way, loaded with tomatoes or watermelons.
At the rim of the cliff the terraces of the town overlook the frothing ocean far below. The houses are painted in traditional Greek colours — white with blue windowsills and doorstops. From here I could see that the cliffs swept around in a crescent moon shape, forming the one remaining wall of a vast volcanic cauldron. Down below there were smaller islands of black lava, some still steaming with the fury of the Earth’s core.
On the other end of Santorini, in the opposite crook of the crescent, is Oia, another tiny village. The tourists come here to watch the sunset. Busload upon busload arrives as the sun starts to dip. They line the cliffs and watch the sun boil red and dip at last into the sea. On the day I was there perhaps a thousand people actually broke into applause at the sunset. That was something I had never experienced before. They were clapping as if they had just seen a theatrical performance, and an old man beside me turned my way and smiled wryly. He was from somewhere in England.
“By George,” he said, “that’s the second most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen.”
He appeared to be well into his seventies, so I imagined he had watched plenty of sunsets. I wondered, in fact, if he had seen Chantal’s fine sunset in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Of course, I couldn’t help but ask, “So where is the most beautiful sunset in the world?”
“Oh … I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet. You see, I just like to leave room for improvement.”
The language Homer spoke was only one of a multitude of Greek dialects used in the ninth century B.C. The Greek that’s spoken today comes down to us from only a single one of these many dialects, something we owe largely to Alexander the Great. He was a pupil, we’re often reminded, of Aristotle, who also came from the northern reaches of Greece. But Alexander, thundering across the far plains of Asia, conquering most of the known world, decided there would be only one language for communication in his vast empire. And for this he chose the dialect of Athens.
Attic Greek, as it’s called, wasn’t Alexander’s mother tongue, so his decision was brave and enlightened. He was wise enough to see that in Athens something spectacular was happening. A new world was being forged, and Attic was its language.
Alexander’s decision is a monumental turning point in history, one that’s had a vast effect on humanity. It’s much like the spread of English throughout the world today. English, of course, travelled across the globe under the fist of the British Empire, the one the sun never set on. And in the dissolution of that empire a detritus of English was left in pockets around the planet.
Twenty-five hundred years ago the same was true of Attic Greek. Throughout Europe and the Middle East it became the language of commerce, politics, and religion. Our first democracy and much of the kick-start of Greek philosophy rode on the tails of this one little dialect.
Alexander called this notion of a standard tongue a koine, meaning “to imprint,” in this case a common language stamped upon the various peoples of his empire (from which we get not only the word but the concept of “coining a phrase”). Today Attic roots, largely through the Latin and then the French side of our linguistic ancestry, account for about 30 percent of all English words. And what words they are: tragedy and triumph, poetry and parable, history and tyranny. We have narcotic, embryo, and skeleton. We have arithmetic and paradox. All of these are direct cognates from Attic Greek. Even the name Europe comes from the old Greek tongue. School and music and theatre and symphony and theory and Catholic and character and astronaut — all from the vast encyclopedia that is Greek.
That evening I caught a ferry that would finally take me to Athens. I slept on the deck once more, and in the grey-eyed dawn came to the port of Piraeus. Athens itself is a few kilometres inland. The ferry dumped us off at the dockyards, and I hoisted my backpack once more and ventured up toward the buses.
When I finally arrived in Athens, I was sorely disappointed. I’d taken a huge roundabout, a circling of the entire Aegean Sea, to get here, and what I found was a vast sprawl of ugly concrete apartment blocks. Ten million people live in Athens under a perpetual cloud of exhaust fumes. It’s not a pretty city, and there’s an almost constant barrage of traffic noise.
What was it about this place? Why had I come here?
Way back in graduate school I studied a rather obscure little field in linguistics. I immersed myself in language consciousness. I looked at what it meant to think in one language as opposed to thinking in another. The field was obscure — mostly because everyone else had given up on it. Language consciousness wasn’t politically correct anymore. Anything that could be said or thought in one language could, most surely, be said or thought in another. Wasn’t that true?
Yes, but I still can’t stop thinking that there’s something more to languages, something about them that deeply СКАЧАТЬ