by John Gardner
Peeker banged his fists together on his ears.
Suddenly, miraculously, as the sun in all its splendor breaks from the hood of clouds that encloses the brow of Mount Taygetos, my jailer spoke. “Some disease,” he said. My eyes widened, my mouth dropped open. I turned to stare at him.
“They have some disease,” he said.
Imagine the mouth of a cave speaking! Imagine sober opinions emitting from a horse!
“God bless you, jailer!” I cried, leaping up. “You can talk!” I walked to the door without my crutch, as if the miracle had cured me.
He glowered at me, deeply offended, but now, seeing that the rules were broken, it was a whole new game, he spoke again. “The dishes,” he said, and pointed.
“Of course!” I cried. “God bless you! Of course!” I snatched the dishes from the table.
He took them with lips curled back from his teeth and banged them on the outside wall, getting rid of the few bits of filth we hadn’t eaten. He strode away.
“Have a good day, jailer!” I called. “May the gods watch over you! They listen to what I say, you know. I snap my fingers and…”
A little after noon (we get no lunch; only breakfast and supper) the jailer reappeared and had someone with him. Without speaking, he unlocked the door of my cell and swung the door open. He waved the other man in, came in behind him, and closed the door.
“Physician,” the jailer said.
I bowed. The physician grunted and wrinkled his nose. They do not have toilet facilities here, only a pot, and my control, of late, is not all that it might be. Gingerly still with his nose wrinkled, the physician picked up one of the rats by the tail and examined it I watched eagerly, bending over my crutch, eyes wide with scientific interest. “Some sickness,” I said. “The first one—the one that stinks a little—well, I thought I might have rolled over on it, unwittingly, you know, while I slept. But those other two, there, I found them in the corner. So they were sick.”
The jailer glanced at me. No humorist.
The physician threw the rats out the door, one at a time, lifting each one by the tail. Then he turned, put his hands on his hips, and looked at me. He had black, black eyebrows, thick as a hedge, and tiny black eyes like a rat’s. He had a nose like someone had twisted it for him, and his gray beard hung to his middle. He said, rather casually, it seemed to me, “You sick?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. I felt my forehead. “Am I?” I turned to the jailer for help. He glared at the floor.
“I knew a man once who was never happy unless he was sick, or threatened with execution, or dying. Thaletes was his name. A splendid fellow! How I wish he could be here now!” I laughed, high and wild, like a madman.
The physician winced, then sighed in despair and glanced over at Peeker, who watched it all in gloomy disrespect. Then the physician came over to me. He put his fingertips on my forehead and considered for a moment. At last he nodded.
“I’m sick?” I asked.
“You’re still living.” He looked at my feculence in the corner.
I laughed. “Small comfort He he he!”
They went out.
I was sorry, afterward, that I’d played the buffoon. It would be pleasant to know for sure that one is not dying. But I occupy my mind with other thoughts. My jailer likes me, or anyway cares about my health. It’s not his duty. When Thaletes got sick in prison, they let him die. He enjoyed it, of course, so it was different. Nevertheless…
Thaletes, wherever you are, you’re not forgotten!
I We who live on still cherish your words of truth!
Happiness is delusion! Life is rotten!
Reality is a hole in a lady’s tooth!
I must pull myself together. This is very unwise. What would Solon do in this saddening situation? That’s what I must think of.
He’d write some fool poem.
So would Thaletes, of course. No doubt he was mad.
I visited him once in prison. (Read with both eyes, Peeker! He he!) He knew he was dying. You wouldn’t have guessed, to look at him, that he was the happiest of men. He had a single cell that looked down on the river, exactly like this cell of mine. Perhaps I have his same cell, I don’t know. When I came to see him, it was late afternoon, and the cell was full of shadows. There was a crude wooden table very much like mine, and some writing materials on it, I think, and a three- legged stool. The floor was covered, unlike mine, with straw. He had no lamp, as far as I remember, but he had a woolen blanket twisted up under him where he lay.
He’d been a famous man, once. He lived in Krete. He was a poet-philosopher, one of the best-known wise- men of his time when Lykourgos landed in Krete, during the period of his travels. I didn’t know him then—Thaletes—but I have read what was written of him: “…though by his outward appearance and his own profession he seemed to be no other than a lyric poet, in reality he performed the part of one of the ablest lawgivers in the world. The very songs which he composed were exhortations to obedience and concord, and the very measure and cadence of the verse, conveying impressions of order and tranquility, had so great an influence on the minds of the listeners, that they were insensibly softened and civilized, insomuch that they renounced their private feuds and animosities, and were reunited in a common admiration of virtue.” (I quote from memory, but I don’t mean that as an apology, boy. I quote with the memory of a professional in these matters.) How much truth there may be in what is written of him, God only knows. I’ll admit that I have seen crowds moved by a stirring tale, or tranquilized by stories of childhood love and peace; and I’ll admit that the songs attributed to Thaletes are rather moving, in their way, though always overweighty and sometimes coarse and, in my personal opinion, obscene. But if Thaletes ever gave out a law, I never heard of it, and if he ever quieted an angry mob, it must have been a mob of thoughtful old men. What he did, besides make up tediously intellectual songs, was two things: he worked out a strange, difficult theory about what people are, and he fought in the underground at Amyklai. Lykourgos, I forgot to say, brought Thaletes home with him from Krete and set him up in his palace as an “adviser,” as he later did myself. Thaletes immediately adopted the customs Lykourgos was busy imposing on his people—hard work, sparse and plain food, a minimum of clothing, a minimum of sex. His masochistic pleasure should have made the horse (Lykourgos, I mean) suspicious at once, but it didn’t. Thaletes wrote war songs, hymns to hardship, satires on sex, and when he’d busily helped Lykourgos strip Sparta of all the traditional human freedoms, he turned on Lykourgos and tried to lead the Helots in an uprising. It fizzled, and Thaletes fled to Amyklai. Lykourgos put the city under martial law, and Thaletes helped form and run what came to be called the underground. He wrote, during this period, as never before in his life: tales, songs, philosophy books. He must hardly have slept seven hours, if six, in a week. The theme of all he wrote was the same: Man truly knows himself only when face to face with death. We in the underground…etcetera.
I knew his theories and was not especially interested. I visited only because I had heard he was sick. If he turned out later to be a great man, with opinions worthy of putting in my book, I would be sorry to have missed him.
I stood at the door of his cell. The jailer withdrew.
“Thaletes!” I called. No answer. I called out again.
For a long time the creature on the straw pallet lay still, but I knew he had heard. He had closed the hand stretched out toward the table, as if angrily resisting me. I called one more time and now the tangled gray mat of hair—all I could see of his miserable head—stirred a little in short, mechanical jerks. At last he brought his face into my line of vision. It was gray as old ashes, and lined like the face of a mummy. There were round holes in his beard and part of one eyebrow was missing. Ringworm. His seeming age was incredible: I knew he could not be over forty-five.
“Thaletes, my name is Agathon,” I said. “A fellow philosopher-poet, though the world is not yet aware of it. I come to ask if there’s anything
I can do.”
He made a great effort and stretched his eyes open wider. “Go away!” he said. It was the hiss of an old, old python.
“Be reasonable, Thaletes,” I said. “Think! You have no one to talk to, you’re too weak to write. All that goes through your famous mind is lost! Yea, lost forever!”
He laughed—hiss, hiss, hiss—and I thought I had overplayed, but it wasn’t that. He had no humor in him. The laughter ended in a coughing fit that made him squeeze his eyes tight and clench the one fist I could see. The other fist lay under his crotch and he couldn’t get it free, apparently. He would jerk at it fiercely now and then, and then he would quit, with a startled look, and would let his head fall back to the floor with a thud that should have broken his jaw.
“I’m a scribe, Thaletes,” I said earnestly. (It’s even possible that I meant to be kind.) “I could write for you.”
He laughed again, until his mouth stretched open against his will, exactly like the muscle spasm of something dying. “I don’t need you,” he whispered. “I’m free.”
I looked, noncommittally, at the bars. He laughed again.
“Mere facticity,” he said, and laughed again. But suddenly he frowned. “No, perhaps I’m mixed up.” He wet his lips, straining to think. Then he laughed, startled. “Free!” he said.
I patted the bars with my fingertips. “Perhaps in a certain sense,” I began.
“Not in a certain sense! Free!” He was enraged, his whole frail body shaking like a mountainside in an earthquake. He tried to drag himself toward me, snatching at straw and pulling on it, but the straw came to him and his body lay as it was. “What am I?” he hissed. “Am I the It that walks and talks, or am I the Not-It that watches what walks and talks? I am the Not-It! Not-It!”
“That’s true,” I said, as soberly as possible.
“Precisely, precisely! And what is the world? The world is the It that my Not-It’s It is not!”
“That probably follows,” I said.
“Precisely! Since my Not-It is not It, I am free of It, true? Hopelessly, joyfully abandoned to my freedom! Is that not so?”
I rubbed my chin. “It may well be.”
“Precisely.” He laughed. “Let us say that my body—my everything-except-what-thinks-about-itself—as it functions in the world, is It-within-Itness. Let us say that.”
“Good.”
“Then what is the nature of my freedom? I cannot choose my Itness itself: it is prior to me. I can choose only the goals of my It, and thus I create my It-as- What-It-Is. I choose to build a house, for example, and I define my It as That-Which-Will-Build-a-House. Excellent! We’re progressing! But am I free to build a house? I’m in prison! Ha ha!” He laughed and laughed. I waited. “My freedom,” he said softly, slyly, “is contingent: I am free to choose ways of manipulating what I might possibly manipulate, the Itness of the World.”
“Of course.” I believed I more or less understood, in a certain sense.
“Let us say that I am not in prison, and I choose to ride an elephant which exists. I have chosen a goal, the riding of the elephant, and simultaneously I have chosen a means—an attempt to ride. I now face two problems: First, my free choice indicates that other free choices are possible, for instance the choice not to ride the elephant after all: hence, my freedom eats away my freedom. Second, my free choice of a goal may be of one beyond my power: the elephant may be too mean or, if not that, too bumpy for me to stay on!”
“That’s true.” I did not feel I was contributing much.
“Nevertheless, my Not-It has, we discover, defined more than just my It. It has also defined the elephant. This particular elephant, which manifests a profound resistance if I wish to ride it, will on the contrary be a valuable aid if I want to kill my enemy by making him ride it. In itself, you see, the elephant is neutral; that is, it waits to be illuminated by an end in order to manifest itself as adverse or helpful. It is, we might say, a brute existent. Now pay close attention! We are free when the final term by which we make known to ourselves what we are is an end: that is, not a real existent like that which in the supposition which we have made could fulfill our wish, but an object which does not yet exist. Only an ensemble of real existents can separate us from this end—in the same way that this end can be conceived only as a state-to-come of the real existents which separate me from it. The resistance which freedom reveals in the existent, far from being a danger to freedom, results only in enabling it to arise as freedom! There can be a free Not-It only as engaged in a resisting world! Outside this engagement, the notions of freedom, determinism, and necessity lose all meaning!”
“I see,” I said.
He dropped his head into the straw and panted. At last, with enormous difficulty, he said, “You don’t see. Nobody does.”
“Perhaps that’s so.”
A terrible shaking came over him, and I looked away.
“Nevertheless,” he said at last, “to be free does not mean to obtain what one has wished, but only to determine one’s wish oneself. Success is wholly irrelevant. If I wish to be free of this stinking cell and I cannot achieve it, I illustrate the common case. The history of a man’s life is the history of a failure. That is my happiness.”
Years later, after I’d reread his writings, it came to me that he was not exactly wrong. At the time, however, I was more interested in his politics. Why had he first supported Lykourgos, taking delight in his inhumanity, then turned on him, stirring up the Helots? I said, “Is it possible that it was your love of failure that attracted you to Lykourgos’s scheme—and then, when, against all reason, the scheme began to work, turned you against Lykourgos?”
He lay still. More still, it seemed to me, than the stone walls of his cell. At last—horribly—horribly!—he sighed. “You’ve understood nothing,” he whispered.
“Perhaps that’s so.”
With a look of terrible sorrow, for all his talk of joy, he raised his head two inches, enough to look at me by rolling his eyes up to almost under the lids. “Freedom is individual,” he said. “Lykourgos’s antimaterialism established the possibility of personal freedom. But antimateralism is a metaphor, a myth.”
I sighed. He was a very difficult person.
“Pay attention!” he hissed. “Lykourgos denies the value of substance, but he exploits. He’s a hypocrite! A despot! All government is imposition except the government freely chosen for the moment by one man. Who knows which government a free man would choose? Values leap up before our acts like partridges!”
“But that’s absurd!” I broke in. “If every man in Sparta is to choose his own form of government—”
“Never mind,” he said, petulant, crabby. “We all fail. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Thaletes,” I said, “is there anything practical I can do for you?”
He lay quiet as a fallen column. Perhaps he was dead. When I visited, the next day, he’d been dead for several hours.
I was not impressed by Thaletes’s opinions, I admit. Even after I had reread his work and discovered that his ideas made a kind of sense, I was not particularly impressed. But at least one person in Sparta was deeply moved by all he said. When reading became relatively easy for her—not so much through my influence as through my high-minded (or anyway high- toned) staying away from her, abandoning her, as Thaletes would have said, to her freedom—Iona read all Thaletes wrote in the underground days at Amyklai. Things she’d said clumsily before, she said now with the dangerous conviction one gets from new big words.
I sat with her in the garden once, and after a good deal of talk about nothing, murders and suicides, fires and secret messages, she handed me, timidly, a letter she’d been working on—a letter on ridiculous cheap pink parchment, which she intended to send to sympathizers throughout Lakonia. The writing was crude, each stroke violent, and I was embarrassed for her. But the ideas were interesting. It went something like this:
One can no more judge the means without the end which gives it meaning t
han he can detach the end from the means which defines it. Murdering a Helot or suppressing a hundred members of the Opposition are two analogous acts. Murdering a Helot is an absolute evil—it represents the survival of an obsolete civilization, the perpetuation of a struggle of races which has to disappear! Suppressing a hundred opponents may be an outrage, but it can have meaning and a reason. It is a matter of maintaining or saving a Power which prevents the absolute evils of bigots and despots.
I read it over twice.
“Well?” she said. The girlish dimples. Puzzling beside what she’d written.
I said, “Hmm.” After a while I said, “Iona, you can’t be serious about all this.”
“Why not?” she said. No smile now.
“Because it’s silly. It’s philosophically naïve.”
She closed both hands around her cup, wounded, and I was sorry I’d said it. I should have guessed she’d taken her philosophizing seriously. (I had, in fact. Why do I excuse myself?) Her jaw was very sharp now. “I never claimed to be a philosopher. I just act.”
“I know. But according to Thaletes, the choice and the action are one.”
“I wouldn’t know what Thaletes says. Whoever he is.”
I sighed and let it stand. There were two squirrels on the porch, and I watched them, studying their unreasonably perfect balance. “You send these things to the troops?” I asked. Ironic, of course. They had only a handful of fighters.
“We don’t need to talk about it.”
I sighed again. How had we gotten onto these crazy spiderwebs? “You want me out of here, Iona?” I asked.
“Oh…” She glanced at me, smiled, touched my hand. “Let’s just not talk,” she said.
I asked, “Who do you talk to, Iona?”
She smiled, fond and distant, this time. “The gods.”
I must stop here. I feel curiously weak. It is possible that I am unwell.
27 Peeker:
We have a chance, I think. I fight the temptation to count on it, but I think we may really have a chance.
