Socrates
The memory of
it keeps coming back to me and chills me to my bone. While reading the death scene in the Phaedo, I suddenly found myself
transformed back into the blue-grey light of that Grecian cell, and I was
overcome by the strangest feeling that I was in the presence of little boys who
had been caught up in the drama of a play that suddenly had become deadly
earnest, as stark and real as that Mediterranean sunlight that leaves not even
shadows vague and undefined.
Sudden
death – sharp as the blade of a knife held against his breast – was there, and
there was no turning back. His whole
life and its meaning had been caught up in that drama … and it must be played
to its proper conclusion, its logic hard and cold as that of a dream. With any other ending, it had been a
different dream, another life, one in which there was no Socrates.
And,
outside the dream? Beyond the curtain
about to be drawn? Nothing. Darkness
black and empty as the heart of deepest sleep.
And yet, over the centuries it comes down to us still intact, held
together by its relentless logic, this dream of a man who told us that our life
is nothing but false appearances, nothing but a dream.
So
what is this coldness blowing through my soul, nameless fear of falling
infinite spaces through that void where dreams are gone, eternities away from
distant points of stars that we will never reach? It is knowing that this dream was really
lived by a man of flesh and blood, a man as real as you or I.
Down
those darkened corridors of time, grown twenty-four centuries long and cold,
who can see his daylight? Who can taste
the honeyed sweetness of bread once upon his tongue, or breathe those salt-sea
breezes blown from wine-red ancient seas?
How can we hope to feel his living pulse, the passion that inflamed his
now cold brain, as more than part of a lost fable from times of old?
Who
can read the dust or feel it on their finger tips? Yet, surely the birds sang for him on that
bright and early morning in his beloved Athens.
And, surely, the door through which he passed was every bit as hard and
real for him as is the death that waits for you and me.
The
question that I want to ask (and do not want the answer) is: Did this man I cannot help but love awaken
from his dream before his lines were out?
Did he step outside himself at last, to observe the motions of his body,
a spectator to his own performance … to finally hear full force the terrible
reality of the words he spoke, that in truth the life that he had lived as a
dream was in fact no less and nothing more – a dream that acquired its reality
and permanence (still only the reality of a dream) only from his taking it so seriously?
Surely
he must have awakened as the end came near enough to touch. How could it have escaped him? Staring into the face of nothingness, there
are no false reflections, no appearances of any kind at all to trick and take
us in.
And
yet, he walked off the stage with a joke:
“I owe a cock to Asclepius” – the god to whom one makes sacrifice upon
recovering from a long illness.
Socrates: Serious to the end.
W
.J. Holly
No comments:
Post a Comment