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,...
Nothing says structure like food. Meals are the girders that hold the day upright. Without them, time collapses onto itself and gravity increases exponentially, like in a black hole. This is a scientific fact.
Dining while stationary is pleasurable enough, but my enjoyment increases exponentially when in motion. There is something wonderfully decadent about the combination of dining and moving. At least there once was.
In 1868, George Pullman inaugurated the first dining car. He named it the Delmonico, after the famous New York restaurant. Fine dining had taken to the rails.
The menu, printed on silk, offered dozens of choices, including oysters and Welsh rarebit. All served on fine china, naturally, and complemented with a bottle of Chateau Margaux or perhaps a sparkling Krug.
A New York Times correspondent wrote breathlessly of his 1869 journey on board a Pullman from Omaha to San Francisco. He adored the antelope steak (“The gourmet who has not experienced this—bah! What does he know of the feast of fat things?”) and swooned over the mountain brook trout (cooked in a sauce “piquante and unpurchaseable”). All served, he notes, on “tables covered with snowy linen.”
I consider my Amtrak food and regret having missed the golden age of railway dining by a good century. My linen is not snowy. My china is not fine. There are no bumpers of sparkling Krug, though, to be fair, my Diet Coke does fizz a bit. My entrée—allegedly seared shrimp over rice pilaf—does not make me swoon. It is edible, yes, but not gourmet.
All philosophers, like all teenagers, are misunderstood. It comes with the territory. None is more misconstrued, more unjustly maligned, than the great philosopher of pleasure, Epicurus.
Born in 341 BC, on the island of Samos, Epicurus turned to philosophy at a young age, and for the usual reasons: an abundance of questions and a deep suspicion of the answers adults gave him. He studied the greats—Heraclitus and Democritus in particular. Soon he amassed his own students, drawn to his charming and accessible teaching style. He often used colorful, shocking language. Like Socrates, Epicurus was a practitioner of Crazy Wisdom. People needed to be shaken out of their trance, and by any means necessary.
Epicurus hopped around the Greek world, living briefly in Colophon (now Turkey) and on the island of Lesbos, before settling in Athens, at the age of thirty-five. There he purchased a house outside the city walls. Encircled by a large wall, it contained a lush garden. The perfect place, he thought, to found a school, and a community. Instantly popular, it eventually became known simply as Kepos. The Garden.
Gardens and philosophy go together well. Voltaire, the darling of the French Enlightenment, said “we must cultivate our garden.” The seventeenth-century English writer and gardener John Evelyn agreed, adding that the “air and genius of gardens” lend themselves to “philosophical Enthusiasms.”
I love that phrase. The world needs more philosophical enthusiasts. Not students of philosophy, and God knows not experts, but enthusiasts, with all of the unabashed gusto the word implies. Gardens, sequestered from the noise of the world, lend themselves to such philosophical enthusiasms.
Gardens require tending. So do our thoughts. Someone who thinks is not a philosopher any more than someone who putters about in his backyard is a gardener. Both pursuits—gardening and philosophy—require an adult’s disciplined commitment combined with a child’s easy joy.
Both pursuits represent an attempt to create, not impose, order out of chaos while retaining a hint of wildness, à la Thoreau, and a dash of mystery, too. The gardener collaborates with nature. Dresses it up, as Voltaire said. The gardener does her bit, planting and shoveling and weeding but, ultimately, the fate of her garden lies elsewhere. It rests with the natural processes—and, yes, the magic—that unfolds within the garden walls. Philosophy contains its own magic, provided you do the hard work.
Places matter. They are repositories of ideas. That’s why I travel, and why I am here now, in Athens, searching for traces of Epicurus and his garden. It won’t be easy. Archaeologists, with all the tools and smarts at their disposal, have yet to pinpoint its precise location. Yet this does not dampen my philosophical enthusiasm. You needn’t know what you’re looking for in order to find it. Gumption is the best navigator.
After a few wrong turns, I find my first landmark: the Dipylon, or Double Gate. Once the main entrance to Athens, it was the largest gate of the ancient world. The centuries have shrunk the gate to a low stone wall—not unlike, I imagine, the one in Philadelphia where Jacob Needleman and Elias sat and experienced questions.
In olden times, a city’s walls demarcated two worlds. To step outside the city walls was to make a statement, and to take a chance, as Rousseau knew so well. Today, the neighborhood outside the Double Gate occupies a netherworld: that fleeting interval between the formerly sketchy and the currently unaffordable. Auto repair shops abut trendy cafés. I stop and listen, as Schopenhauer would. A rhythmic banging emanates from the auto shops, pop music from the cafés. Laughter, too. People seeking pleasure, just as they did in Epicurus’s time, and long before.
I pause at a small clearing between two not-yet-hip concrete buildings. I notice a few scrappy plants sprouting from the concrete. Not a garden, exactly, but close enough. I try to imagine the scene some 2,500 years ago.
The streets back then were crowded. I can picture a young woman among the throng. Her name is Themista, the history books tell us. As a woman, life is difficult even in the best of times. And these are not the best of times. Nothing seems certain anymore. Alexander’s death upended the world. The old order has collapsed and a new one has yet to take its place.
I can picture Themista venturing outside the city gates, taking a chance, when she spots a walled compound. On one side is an odd inscription: “Stranger, your time will be pleasant here. Here the highest good is pleasure.”
Themista is intrigued. This sounds much more inviting than Plato’s Academy, not far from here. There a more foreboding sign greets visitors: “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.” She steps across the threshold and finds not only a garden but a small farm, and a welcoming atmosphere.
Epicurus’s choice of a walled garden, in a relatively remote location, was no accident. In a sharp break with the Stoics and other philosophical schools, he urged his followers to avoid “the prison of business affairs and politics.” Political bonds, Epicurus thought, reduced your self-sufficiency, and amounted to outsourcing your happiness. His motto was Lathe Biosas. “Live in obscurity.” Such reclusiveness was as controversial then as it is today. Those who withdraw from the world are always suspect. We mock the recluse to the extent we feel threatened by him.
Epicurus broke with tradition in other ways, too. While most schools accepted only male citizens of Athens, Epicurus welcomed freed slaves and women, like Themista, to whom he dedicated several works.
Not surprisingly, a walled-off community that welcomed people not normally welcome and advocated a life devoted to pleasure raised suspicions. Rumors of orgies and lavish feasts circulated. Epicurus, it was said, vomited twice a day due to overindulgence and “for many years he was unable to get out of his sedan chair.”
The rumors were unfounded. The Garden resembled a monastery more than a brothel. Life was communal, with little privacy. “Let nothing be done in your life, which will cause you fear if it becomes known to your neighbor,” said Epicurus. Few of his followers seemed to mind that prohibition. They had nothing to hide.