The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
It’s impossible not to take beauty personally. A blood-red sunset. An ink-black night sky specked with countless stars. Personal verdicts, all of them. As the philosopher Roger Scruton said, “A world that makes room for such things makes room for you.”
For Thoreau, seeing and feeling were intertwined. He couldn’t see something if he didn’t feel it. How he felt determined not only how he saw but what he saw. For him, seeing was not only emotive but also interactive. When he saw, say, a rose, he corresponded with it and, in a way, collaborated with it. I realize that sounds odd, a tad unhinged. Many artists, though, describe a similar phenomenon: When they look at an object, they sense it looking back at them. They can’t all be nuts.
Read the journals. Leslie Wilson’s words lodge in my brain like a bad Top 40 song you can’t shake. Thoreau kept a journal most of his adult life, some two million words spanning fourteen volumes.
When I screw up my courage and turn to the first volume, I’m overcome with dread, and flash back to ninth-grade English class. As I read, the dread lifts, replaced by relief, and, ultimately, delight. In his journals, Thoreau comes alive in a way he doesn’t in Walden. This is Thoreau at his most honest, and vulnerable. “I never know, and shall never know, a worse man than myself,” he writes at one point.
We tend to think of Thoreau as—how do I say this diplomatically?—a wuss. Reading his journals set me straight. The pages reveal a virile Thoreau. Philosopher as action hero. He walks, skates, swims, tastes fermented apples, chops wood, sounds ponds, surveys lots, paddles upriver, builds houses, plays the flute, juggles, shoots (he was an expert marksman), and, on at least one occasion, stares down a woodchuck. He did all these activities to see better. “It needs the doing hand to make the seeing eye,” he said.
Thoreau wasn’t afraid to get his hands, or any other body part, dirty. In one journal entry, he describes immersing himself in a swamp up to his chin, feeling the cool mud against his skin, embracing the scum.
As I wade deeper into the journals, I hear echoes of Marcus and his Meditations. Like Marcus, Thoreau is having a conversation with himself. We, the reader, just eavesdrop. I hear Socrates, too. They are not obvious doppelgängers, these two. Centuries separate them. Thoreau wrote more than two million words, Socrates not a single one. Yet they are philosophical brothers.
Like Socrates, Thoreau led an examined life, one conducted with a “fearless self-inspection.” Like Socrates, Thoreau vacillated between terrific velocity and utter stillness. He walked four miles a day but could also, as one neighbor recalls, “sit motionless for hours, and let the mice crawl over him and eat cheese out of his hand.”
Both Socrates and Thoreau asked a lot of impertinent questions, which annoyed people. Both were pains in their respective eras’ asses. Useful irritants. Both paid a price. Athens put Socrates to death. Concord panned Thoreau’s writing.
Like Socrates, Thoreau believed all philosophy begins with wonder. He expresses this idea many times, in many ways, but my favorite is this simple line from Walden: “Reality is fabulous.” I love the way Thoreau sounds less like a philosopher and more like an awestruck teen. Maybe they’re not so different.
The Concord dust Thoreau wrote about so lovingly has today been efficiently hoovered from view. Twenty-first-century Concord is a cute-as-a-button New England town, with curated wine shops, precious cafés, and, on warm spring days, bicyclists in peacock colors astride their pricey rides. The sort of town where Thoreau, with his shabby clothes and undisciplined mane, would draw searching, albeit discreet, glances.
I have to give Concord this: it wears its history well. Everything is low-key. New England understated. Even the local Rite Aid and Starbucks sport tasteful, temporally appropriate architecture.
The town’s most famous son gets his due, of course. There is a Thoreau Street and a Thoreau School and a fitness center called, yes, the Thoreau Club. There is no Thoreau Water Park or Thoreau Wax Museum.
June 20 is the summer solstice. A good day, I figure, to contemplate the art of seeing. If we really are children of the light, then today is our birthday.
I wake early in order to… what? To be Thoreau? No. That’s neither possible nor advisable. But I figure by tracing the arc of his day, I might, for a moment, see the world through his eyes.
Thoreau, unlike Marcus, was a morning person. He savored those first moments of consciousness, that “debatable ground between dreams and thoughts,” and liked to quote this line from an ancient Indian text, the Vedas: “All intelligences awake with the morning.”
Bathing in the pond at dawn, Thoreau then dove into his “morning work,” reading and writing. He might refine a rough journal entry, or polish a chapter. The physical sensation of a hand moving across a page was for Thoreau, the occasional yogi, a kind of meditation.
Notebook and pen in hand, I devote my morning work to some nagging questions about Thoreau. What did he see in seeing? How did he manage to see so much? I stare at these questions for a long time. They stare back, mute. We’re at an impasse. So I do what Thoreau did when his muse absconded. I close my notebook and lace my walking shoes.
Every day, usually in the afternoon, Thoreau walked the Concord countryside. Like Rousseau, he couldn’t think clearly unless his legs were moving. While Rousseau embarked on reveries, Thoreau sauntered. (He loved that word.) He sauntered in order to shake the village and return to his senses.
Thoreau didn’t need a destination when he sauntered, but I do. In a blatant act of civil disobedience, I decide to ignore Leslie Wilson’s warning about visiting that overcrowded swamp-hole otherwise known as Walden Pond. I unfurl the little map of the trail leading from Concord to the pond. It’s less than two miles. Thoreau’s cabin in the woods was more of a cabin on the outskirts of a vibrant little town. I cut Thoreau some slack. A book called Walden, or a Life in a Cabin Not Very Far at All from Civilization lacks commercial appeal.
I’m loading my backpack, a sleek urban model that Thoreau would never own, when I decide to do something out of character. I tuck my smartphone into the desk drawer and step outside without it.
It takes only a few minutes for the withdrawal symptoms to manifest: clammy skin, increased heart rate. It’s not that I feel naked without my phone. Naked I could handle. I feel as if I’ve departed on my walk without my liver or some other vital organ. Yet I soldier on.
I see why Thoreau liked to saunter here. The air is soft and cool, in repose. The ground feels plush underfoot. I’m reminded of what Thoreau’s friend John Weiss said of him: “He walked as if a great deal of surmising went on between the earth and him.” Not as much surmising goes on between the earth and me—small talk, really—but I soon find my stride. I’m determined to channel Thoreau’s visual acumen.
What I see first is a blur, approaching rapidly. The blur is wearing a denim bandanna and white earbuds. Arms pistoning, muscular legs pumping, she is the picture of efficiency. She is not sauntering.
I arrive at a body of water called Fairyland Pond and sit on a nearby bench. I look but I don’t see. “Go not to the object; let it come to you,” Thoreau chides, in that covertly critical way of his. “Pond scum,” I mutter.
It’s not working. I see nothing but hear everything: the whine of a propeller plane high overhead, the whoosh of a passing car from a road nearby. Twenty-first-century sounds. I owe my acute sense of listening to my years as an NPR correspondent. There I learned to hear what others might not. Everything has a sound. Even a seemingly dead-quiet room, if you listen hard enough. “Room tone,” audio engineers call it. I wonder: Is sensory acuteness transferable? Can I convert my keen ear into a keen eye?