Mountains of People
I was lying in bed reading a book about ancient Greece, it’s history, the culture and identity of the people. Like many books about Greece there is always a chapter about Crete, about what little is known from the fragments of remains. There are ideas about the people, but, there is also a great deal we don’t know about a civilization that deserved that term applied to it; a civilization.
The Greek Polis however fascinated me. A community, a state, a politic, a society and a group. There was their religion, their economy, wars and murders and adventures in a time that for the most part only scrapes past our imaginations. And, here I am, in a room, in a house, on a street. The street lights are lit, I have my notebook, lamp and pen to hand, and alone, in my mind is the formation of a world and a people that once were never to be again. But, it is only the they in my mind from the book. Not even them. But, they were. And I am being purposefully abstruse.
There are also, beyond this house, and this street, and the lights that light the part of the city that I am in, mountains. There the air is fresher than here. It is quiet and I imagine too that the stars have a degree more clarity to them. The world beyond the four walls is wide, the adventures to be had, great, the imaginations of the people for whom those adventures can be had, wonderful places to be.
It is 3am at the present time, the 13th of June 2009, in Los Angeles California. Yet, stretching behind me are strings of moments, events in the cosmic expanse of time that my body has occupied; filled by as much space as sight would see and feeling touch. For each passing moment that I walked through a door or corridor a new world opened up, and I am one man.
Trinity College Library
Mountains
If history has anything to teach, if the books that we, as children had to read at school had one commonality, it is this; that the world is, and has been, and it will continue to be populated. Stretching from Mecdeon to Vladivostok, through time people too have walked corridors of their own, with thoughts of their own in their heads and emotions, impassioned like the start of a rhythm in their hearts, about to burst free intangible consciousness before them. Just as I am now.
Read Plato, not for the Philosophy, but for the conversation. These were men, eating, joking, talking with one another. There were abrupt and less rational youths with their better contemplated men of gray hair, each enjoying a brisk moment of human contact. These were men wondering in the way we wonder today in our passing moments of indolence. Read Plato for the conversation, not to learn his ideas, but, to improve your grasp as a human on the world. It will improve you.
There is an unfortunate degeneration in our greatest of great civilizations. It is that we have lost the simplicity of the profoundest imagination. Our riches have grown, and with them the possible things we we can imagine to have. But the spirit that glides us to the mountains of the Pyrenees, or the sands of Arabia we can not buy, and so we are limited to a lesser epic and a smaller spirit. No longer the lovers quarrel in Petersbourg or the murder of Clytemnestra in a play of justice. No longer the life of a man and a woman in the growing province of Paris or the breakfast tables of the Pilgrim Fathers. No longer even my own grandmother, who ran through the forest of Russia with her schoolchildren during the war, hungry for food. The issues of our time and our place, the locality of our world is narrow enough.
But you, for one moment, one moment of your mind, breathe the whole of the history you know. The lives of the people who must compose it. Breathe the consciousness of every soul who has added one drop to the world you now live and you are one step closer to a human divinity, to realizing humanity for what it is. That despite the wars, despite the judicious and political men of ages, there were hearts and minds, there were fantasies and the ratiocination of Ionians listening to Homer as well as the stoned awe of Catherine the Great for Voltaire. And beside the world of the intellect, above and beyond it, above all else., the mountainous movement of humanity.