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,...
Traveling with her on yet another train, I glance at this girl on the verge of womanhood. Earbuds firmly inserted, fingers flying across her smartphone, she doesn’t notice when I reach for my Old Man notebook and my Old Man pen, and write:
Dear Sonya:
Question everything, especially your questions. Gaze at the world with wonder. Speak to it with reverence. Listen to it with love. Never stop learning. Do everything, but make time for nothing, too. Cross bridges on any damn level you want. Don’t curse your Sisyphean rock. Own it. Love it. Oh, and cut back on the McDonald’s.
Or not. It is your choice.
14. How to Die like Montaigne
11:27 a.m. On board TGV train No. 8433, en route from Paris to Bordeaux.
Outside, a gray sky swaddles the French countryside like a down blanket. Inside, uncertainty reigns. We have slipped on board without a reserved seat. We must change seats at every station, as more passengers board. It makes for an unsettled journey. Just as I get acquainted with my seat, I’m evicted and have to start again.
This is the way of unreserved train travel, and of philosophy, too. Just as we become comfortable with a certain position—all knowledge is derived from the senses, for instance—something upends our certainty and we must begin again. It’s exhausting, this constant fleeing from comfort and certainty, but necessary.
I glance at Sonya, wired into her digital world, unfazed by our displacements. Why can’t I be more like her, I wonder?
I am wrapping my mind around this thought, getting comfortable with it, when my cogitation is jarred by another influx of passengers. I gather my Old Man books and Old Man pens and amble down the aisle, in search of a new home.
Picture an enormous swimming pooclass="underline" one large enough to hold seven billion people. No one has ever seen the pool, but there’s no denying its existence. At some point, everyone is thrown into the pool. Most are tossed when they’re older, but some are tossed in middle age and a few while still young. Only the timing is in question. No one escapes being thrown into the pool. No one has ever emerged.
Given all these facts, you’d think there’d be enormous public interest in the pool. Questions. How deep is the pool? Is the water warm or cold? How can I prepare for getting tossed in the pool? Is this tossing something I should fear?
Yet people rarely discuss the pool and, when they do, it is indirectly. Some people won’t even utter the words “swimming pool.” They’ll say “body of water” or, more obliquely, the “big you-know-what.” Teachers do not discuss the pool with their students. Parents (with few exceptions) do not discuss it with their children. It is considered impolite to raise the swimming pool at dinner parties or other social occasions. People steadfastly avoid even thinking about the pool. Better, they conclude, to leave it to the pool professionals.
Yet, try as they might to push it away, the giant swimming pool is always there, looming in the back of their minds like an unseen watery monster. As they sip their lattes, file their expense reports, tuck their children into bed, a question, faint but undeniable, bubbles into consciousness: Is today the day I get tossed in the pool?
All the philosophers I’ve encountered on my journey speak to me. Some more loudly than others. None speaks as loudly and clearly as Michel de Montaigne. The sixteenth-century Frenchman is the philosopher I most want to have a beer with. I see myself in Montaigne, and Montaigne in me. It is not so much his ideas but how he arrives at them—circuitously, tentatively—that attracts me. Montaigne gets me. He is my philosophical soul mate.
Like me, Montaigne is restless in mind and body. Like me, he enjoys traveling but enjoys coming home more. Like me, he is a compulsive underliner and annotator. Like me, he has atrocious handwriting and struggles to unscramble what he’s written. Like me, he is terrible with money and extraordinarily incompetent in the world of business. (“I would rather do anything than read through a contract.”) Like me, he can’t cook. (“If you give me all the equipment of a kitchen, I shall starve.”) Like me, he engages with the world but periodically has a strong, almost irresistible need to flee it. Like me, he is moody. Like me, he is uncomfortable writing about himself but does so anyway. Like me, he has two, and only two, speeds: fast and slow. Like me, Montaigne fears death. Unlike me, he faces his fear head-on.
Death makes philosophers of us all. Even the least contemplative person wonders at some point: What happens when we die? Is death really something to fear? How can I come to terms with it? Death is philosophy’s true test. If philosophy can’t help us deal with life’s most momentous and terrifying event, what good is it? As Montaigne puts it: “All the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die.”
Yet most philosophers approach death the way the rest of us do: by ignoring, or dreading, it. Marcus Aurelius sank into a deep funk whenever he thought of death. Schopenhauer worried how historians might mangle his ideas once he was gone.
Best not to think about death, concludes Epicurus. “Death is nothing to us.” You don’t wake every morning worrying about the time before you were born, so why worry about death? You were absent then and you shall be absent again. “When we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we do not exist.”
I’m not buying it. The nothing that was me before I was born is not the same nothing that will be me after I’m gone. One is a nothing that was always nothing while the other is a nothing that was once something, and that makes all the difference. The void of space and a hole in the earth are not the same. Nothingness is defined by its proximity to what was, and what still is.
Montaigne read Epicurus, and others, on the subject of death and wasn’t satisfied, either. They touched the subject superficially, “barely brushing the crust of it,” he says. He was determined to dive deeper—and did. No philosopher writes about death and dying more honestly and courageously than Michel de Montaigne.
Just as Beauvoir obsessed about growing old, Montaigne obsessed about death, or, to be more specific, dying. “It is not death; it is dying that alarms me,” he said. It occupied his mind when he was ill and when he was well, even “in the most licentious seasons of my life… amid ladies and games.”
I can’t blame him. At the time, the sixteenth century, death was in the air. “Gripping us by the throat,” Montaigne says. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other at an alarming rate. War was only one way to die. The plague killed nearly half the residents of Bordeaux. Only one of Montaigne’s six children survived infancy. His brother Arnaud was just twenty-three years old when he died in a freak accident involving a tennis ball. Killed by a tennis ball! Death is absurd. If it weren’t so final, we’d laugh it off.
The death that stung the most was that of Montaigne’s close friend Étienne de La Boétie. When he died of the plague at age thirty-two, Montaigne felt “as if I had been cut in half.”
Death may not cast as long of a shadow over our day as it did Montaigne’s, but that is small comfort. A shorter shadow is no less dark. Then, as now, the odds of a human being dying are precisely 100 percent, with a margin of error of zero. Everyone gets thrown in the pool.
Grief can crush. Grief can paralyze. Grief can also motivate. It was grief that drove a heartbroken Mughal emperor named Shah Jahan to build the Taj Mahal in memory of his beloved wife. It was grief—over the loss of his wife, daughter, and eyesight—that inspired Milton to pen Paradise Lost. And it was grief that propelled Michel de Montaigne up three winding flights of stairs to the top floor of a red-roofed tower, perched high atop a hill and exposed to the winds, and where he would pen his Essays. From great suffering great beauty arises.