Pilgrim in the Palace of Words. Glenn Dixon
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Pilgrim in the Palace of Words - Glenn Dixon страница 11

Название: Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

Автор: Glenn Dixon

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Путеводители

Серия:

isbn: 9781770705784

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ in a language. It was the House of Being thing again, a palace filled with treasures.

      I had come to Greece to see the birthplace of the Western world, the place where a whole new way of thinking, a whole new world view, was invented. Gazing around Athens, it was hard to imagine that anything special ever happened here. But it did. One rocky promontory still pushes above the clammer and clatter. It’s sadly awash with tourists, of course, here to snap photos and cross one more destination off their lists. And it’s too bad, because this really is the heart of everything. This is the Acropolis, the stony outcropping that’s been inhabited in one way or another for five thousand years. It is a sacred place, an island on the vast Attic plain. Most important, it is the earthly seat of Athena, the goddess of wisdom.

      I managed to find a little pathway around the northern edge of the Acropolis. There are some old houses — painted in the traditional fashion. Bougainvillea flowers drape down the walls, and birds chirp in the foliage.

      The pathway skirts around the back of the Acropolis away from tour buses and snapping cameras. It overlooks the Agora, a large field of rocks that is, or was, the ancient marketplace of Athens. I wandered into a little museum there, mostly to find some shade. There were the inevitable statues, broken and fragmentary. Old, wise eyes stared at me from marble perches. But one small glass case caught my eye. In it a tangle of metal scraps, like a hairball, looked up at me, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

      Nails, the plaque said, cobbler’s nails from the shop of Simon, the shoemaker. The nails were fused together by age, but I read further. It is known, the inscription said, that Socrates often frequented Simon’s little shop. Likely, he held among the first of his lectures here. So, I gathered, this was one of the first informal settings of the Academy of Athens. A young Plato might well have sat beside Simon, helping him to cut leather for shoes while they listened to the great teacher.

      For Socrates the great business of life was dialogue. He spoke with many of the citizens of Athens, switching, within a few sentences, from the mundane and trite observations of weather and shopping that usually pepper our talk, to a deep engagement with thought itself. In one of his first dialogues, as related by Plato, Socrates took on some of the philosophers that had come before him. He was particularly interested in the ancient Greek word arete. Now arete refers to the purpose of something, but more than that it’s the measure of how well something performs its required purpose, the measure of its excellence.

      The Pre-Socratics had spent long hours attempting to define this arete. Everything has its own measure of arete, they claimed. The arete of a chimney, for example, consists in how well it draws smoke up and out of a room and how well it reflects heat back into a room. Odysseus displayed his arete in his unquenchable thirst to return home, to battle even the gods in his desire to make it back to Ithaca.

      But Socrates came to a different conclusion. Just as the purpose of a chimney is to draw smoke up and out of a room, the purpose of a human being is to seek knowledge. Through reason, Socrates said, an individual can free himself from the dark cave of the unknown. Through reason we can unravel the mysteries of the world and venture beyond oracles, gods, and fate.

      And that surely smacks of a world view.

      Now, of course, it would be foolish to imagine that the whole Western world grew from this single word arete. I only point out that sometimes a single word can contain vast, sprawling ideas. New ideas. And it’s not that these words are untranslatable. It’s not that no one else can understand them. It’s just that they emerged here first, that they were believed here first ... in this language.

      I glanced up from the little pile of nails. Had they heard the voice of Socrates? Had these small nails rolled about on the floor while his ideas came into being? Outside, the sun beat relentlessly on the stones. The Acropolis towered blackly above me, and I knew I was onto something. I didn’t completely understand it, but I knew then that languages can contain whole worlds. And I wanted to go and see them.

      After a few days in Athens, I caught the train for Patras, a port city on the west coast of Greece. From there I would go to Italy. The train moved across the backbone of Greece, out over the Corinth Canal, across the top of the Peloponnese.

      It was evening when I left Patras. The ferry to Italy chugged along so slowly that we didn’t seem to move at all. We inched into the Adriatic Sea. The wide island of Cephalonia eventually reared up, and just north of that was a smaller island, green and double-humped. Something about it kept me on deck. The sun was growing larger and pinker in its descent, and the sea was truly wine-dark for an instant. Then I realized which island I was looking at. This was Ithaca, home of Odysseus. The trip from Troy had taken him ten long years, but in the telling of that journey a whole new world was created.

      A single star emerged in the moonless night. I stood for a few moments longer on deck, then ducked back in through a hatchway. I needed rest, so I curled up in a corner and fell asleep to the soft murmur of the sea.

      The ferry pulled into Brindisi on the heel of the boot of Italy, and I stepped off, having had enough of sea travel for a while. Stars still hung in the east, but the harbour was already alive with touts and merchants. Brindisi is better known among travellers as “Brain Disease.” Sorry, but it’s true. There’s a mind-numbingly long wait there between the time ferries pull in and when trains leave to take you up the coast. And there’s nothing to do but sit around the featureless docks trying to safeguard your valuables from hordes of vendors and pickpockets.

      When I finally did get on a train, however, it was headed for Rome, the Eternal City. All around me in the cramped compartment people spoke Italian. It’s a beautiful Romance language that dances on the tongue. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a language for sweeping women off their feet, though it can. Calling it a Romance language means that it’s a remnant of ancient Rome. It’s one of the children of Latin, the tongue of the Roman Empire.

      I found myself a little pension not far from the Spanish Steps in Rome. In a square near there I saw a Japanese couple swarmed by Gypsy children. None of the children were older than ten, and the youngest might have been six. They surrounded the couple, a mob of them, tearing at their pockets, at her purse and his camera. An old lady, dressed entirely in black, had been sitting at the fountain, and at this commotion she suddenly stood and began to blow on a whistle. Then, all along the street, shopkeepers came running out of their stores. It must have been a sort of vigilante system they had set up for the neighbourhood. The Gypsy kids bolted, leaving the poor Japanese tourists confused.

      Afterward I sat with the old woman, who I thought was very brave. She spoke a bit of English and told me a story I’ll never forget.

      “You go to Colosseum?” she asked.

      “Yes, of course. I’ll see it this afternoon.”

      “You see the cats, yes?”

      I had heard of them. The ancient Colosseum of Rome, an immense building that still towers almost jarringly over the centre of the city, crawls with cats.

      The old woman pointed at her chest. “I go to feed the cats.”

      “You СКАЧАТЬ