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,...
“I’m listening.”
“And take Walden and maybe some pages from his journal, and observe.”
“Starbucks? Really?”
“Yes. It’s Thoreau’s words that matter. He was inspired by all this land around us. It helped make Thoreau who he was, but it won’t make you who you are.”
I like this idea. Back in Thoreau’s time, Concord also had a coffee shop, and Thoreau was a regular. Besides, if Thoreau’s wisdom is portable, as all true wisdom is, then surely it’s just as useful sipping an overpriced beverage as it is roughing it in the woods. The heck with Walden. I’m going to Starbucks.
I wake early and pack a Thoreau kit—Walden, his essay “Walking,” a collection of letters to a spiritual seeker named William Blake, selections from his journal. (I’m nearly finished.) I saunter to Concord’s one Starbucks.
It is appropriately Concordian, the lighting a bit softer than most, the furniture a bit more refined. It is still a Starbucks, though, the way Walden is still a pond.
I order a simple coffee, plop down in a big leather chair, and crack open Henry. “Beauty is where it is perceived,” he tells me. Even here, in Starbucks? I look around but find no beauty. My reflex is to blame my surroundings, my Walden.
I catch myself. Don’t be so passive. If you don’t see beauty, create some. Use your imagination. Heighten your senses.
This works, but, again, the wrong sense responds. My acoustic reflex kicks in, and I hear beauty everywhere: the gentle hum of an air conditioner, the musical clink of ice cubes, giggling baristas, beeping cash registers, the singsong call of “Venti Green Iced Tea!” and, off in the distance, sirens.
I take Thoreau’s advice—“all faculties in repose but the one you are using”—and focus exclusively on the visual. Sure enough, I see. I see a young father, sunglasses perched on forehead, muscular arms swinging, cradling his infant son. At the milk and sugar station, I notice how people dance with one another. One step forward, one step back. Excuse me, oh, I’m sorry, pardon my reach, no, pardon mine. I notice how people wait for their order from varying distances. Some crowd the barista, while others give her space. Some people stand still, while others fidget.
Scan, scan, scan. I see the muscular dad again. He’s placed his son on a table and is rocking him back and forth. I wonder if that is wise. Scan. A girls’ softball team, in uniforms of blue, white, and orange, high-fiving their coach. Scan. The man next to me, reading Montaigne. He sees I’m reading Thoreau, and nods approval, discreetly, of course. Concord is the Quiet Car of New England.
Minutes, then hours pass. The muscular dad leaves. So does the softball team, and the man reading Montaigne. Yet I’m still here, glancing. I deploy other Thoreauvian techniques. I change my position, standing by the door for a while, sauntering over to the coffee bar, cocking my head sideways. I consider inverting my head between my legs but decide against it. Even here, in Thoreauville, that is going too far.
Hours later, the man who was reading Montaigne returns. He spots me in the same chair, with the same books, and says, “You’ve been here entirely too long.”
“Actually,” I say, looking up, with fresh eyes, “not nearly long enough.”
It’s true. I need more time. While I see more clearly here, in my own private Walden, I do not have a visual epiphany, the “single expansion” Thoreau achieved. I am disappointed, but take solace in the words of—who else?—Henry David Thoreau. Seeing requires not only time but distance, he tells me. “You cannot see anything until you are clear of it.”
5. How to Listen like Schopenhauer
2:32 p.m. On board Deutsche Bahn, Train No. 151, en route from Hamburg to Frankfurt.
Trains make human noises. Locomotives snort and whistle and, occasionally, belch. The railway cars whine and squeak and protest.
Deutsche Bahn, German Rail, muffles these sounds. There is no need for a Quiet Car. It is a given. Everything about my train whispers discretion. Not only the hushed atmosphere but the wood panel lining the cars, the coffee served in real mugs, not Styrofoam.
I sip my coffee, and survey the understated German countryside. A train heading in the opposite direction passes, its whistle piercing the silence. The sound increases in pitch as the train approaches, then decreases as it passes. Or does it?
The whistle hasn’t really changed pitch. It is an auditory illusion known as the Doppler effect. The motion of the train has conspired with my susceptible brain to make it sound as if the whistle’s pitch had changed. I had misperceived reality.
What if all of life is like this? What if the world is an illusion? Some 2,400 years ago Plato posed just such a question. In “The Allegory of the Cave,” he asks us to imagine prisoners chained inside a cave, facing a stone wall. They have been inside the cave from birth and are unable to move and therefore cannot see each other or even themselves. All they can see are shadows cast on the wall. They’re unaware that they’re looking at shadows. The shadows are the only reality they know.
Philosophy, Plato suggests, enables us to escape the world of shadows and discover its source: the light. We don’t always see the light. Sometimes we hear it.
I wake to an unexpected quiet. Tired from the long train ride, I’m tempted to remain under the covers, Marcus-style. Somehow I muster the willpower to extract myself and head to breakfast. Afterward, I walk, like Rousseau, mindful of each step, only to discover Frankfurt’s streets empty on this, a weekday. I promptly retreat to the hotel and ask questions, like Socrates.
“Where is everyone?”
“A national holiday,” replies the concierge. “Didn’t you know?”
I can hear Thoreau scolding me. Look. Observe. See the world with the eye of a child and the mind of a sage. Open your eyes, man!
I need to regroup. My intended destination, the Schopenhauer Archives, is closed, but surely other establishments are open.
Apparently not. Europeans take holidays seriously. I pass shuttered shops and cafés and must have walked a mile before finding an open coffee shop, an outlier. A good one, too, judging by the beans procured from exotic locales and the serious, artisanal expressions of the baristas.
I order the Sumatran pour-over, which is prepared with an attention to detail usually reserved for neurosurgery and weddings. When I ask for milk, the barista purses his lips and suggests—discreetly, of course—that adding milk to this exquisitely roasted, naturally nonacidic, perfectly balanced Beverage of the Gods would constitute an affront to all that is good and beautiful in the world.
Of course, I say. Wouldn’t dream of it.
I wait until he leaves, presumably to educate another customer, before pouring a splash of milk. I find a table outside and read the first page of Arthur Schopenhauer’s collected essays.
Darkness arrives, and looks like it will be staying awhile. Pessimism infuses each page, every word, much like the hint of chocolate infusing my coffee, only more bitter. Schopenhauer makes no attempt to conceal his glumness. It’s right there in the essay titles: “On the Suffering of the World” and “On Suicide,” for instance.
Don’t blame philosophy for his pessimism. His gloomy outlook manifested at a young age, long before he read Plato or Descartes. At the age of seventeen, while touring Europe with his parents, he concluded, “This world could not be the work of an all-good being, but rather that of a devil who had summoned into existence creatures, in order to gloat over the sight of their agony.” A few years later, embarking on his philosophy career, he writes to a friend: “Life is a wretched business. I have decided to spend it trying to understand it.”