Penelope's Secret

by Nicolas Ségur

  “The darkness of life!” repeated Plato, pensively.

  “Is it not plausible, in fact, that amour, in closing our eyes, which deceive us incessantly, in causing silence in our fallacious senses, permits us a mystical vision of the unknown from which we come? Because, Plato, the terrestrial human being, the human being of flesh, ought to be imagined as a prisoner enclosed in a cave that only receives light from one side. Enchained there and unable to turn his head, he cannot see the illuminating fire projected behind him by the cave entrance. He is, on the contrary, incessantly distracted by the phantoms designed on the back wall of his prison. In fact, between the captive human and the eternal fire that shine outside the cave, there is a steep slope along which chimeras incessantly pass, of which the shadows projected in front of the human being constitute everything that he calls reality.”

  “And one can never emerge from the cave, behind the true light, fathom the reality of what one sees?”

  “Not during this life, Plato, except by means of fugitive flashes of remembrance obtained with the aid of amour. Thus, we can now define the place of amour in the ensemble of things. It is the bridge—or, rather, the ladder—that links the inferior world of appearances, in which humans are enchained in this life, with the world of substances, the eternal world, from which they come. Every time a man feels extracted from himself by passion or the beautiful, he remembers what he has already contemplated before being introduced into terrestrial life. Then he feels winged, he soars, and enthusiasm transfigures him; he forgets his oyster-shell, the body that is like a burden and a punishment. The memory returns to him of the time when his soul was part of the happy choirs of Immortals and when, going beyond the sky, he was able to contemplate the Ideas.”

  “The Ideas?”

  “Yes, the Ideas, the only real verities: the Ideas, the eternal models of things, of which we only see the tarnished and vague reflections down here. Beauty, Justice, Reason, and everything that we try vainly to realize in this life, we have glimpsed up there, in an ideal and perennial completion.”

  “So this life,” said Plato, dazzled, “is only the specter of another, perfect, ideal existence, the approximation of a higher reality that is found elsewhere. As for Philosophy and Art, they are only celestial nostalgias, vague reminiscences of what we once knew, and which we shall rediscover again one day if we are worthy of reintegration in our eternal fatherland.”

  “Well said, Plato, and, as usual, you have anticipated my own words. Philosophy, art, piety and enthusiasm are only means of ascension, wings that extract us momentarily and incompletely from terrestrial exile, attempting to bring us closer to liberty.

  “Thanks to those wings we can soar above the unstable and imperfect world in which the phantoms of things agitate, and contemplate, or at least recall, the divine and joyous realm of the Ideas, the realm of the eternals, where nothing changes, where nothing happens, where nothing perishes, but where everything is complete, radiant and eternal.”

  It was midday.

  A bird intoxicated by light started singing in an olive tree. And the two lovers of wisdom, lost in that light song, divining obscurely that, by means of a magical operation, they were in the process of opening celestial paths of liberation for humankind, remained motionless and silent for a long time, prolonging the conversation in thought, reunited in a burst of harmony by the august peace of things, and sensing the flight of Time without fear.

  VIII. Three Shades

  The next day, Plato emerged from Aspasia’s house in the white twilight before the dawn.

  He had mingled his body with the woman’s body. Through the carnal envelope, by virtue of a complete confusion of impulses and desires, he had believed that he was in communication with the soul of the beloved, and he had sensed all that the concordance of intelligences can add to carnal affinities, how a thought transfigures bodies, and how a purifying flame of human sympathy burns what remains of the animal in the embrace.

  And as Aspasia, in the moment of sensuality, her eyes closed and weary, had show him her face in a relaxation that left more apparent the little that the years had introduced there of alteration and damage, Plato experienced now, as well as the intoxication of pleasure, a kind of melancholy tenderness, a sympathetic emotion inspired by the idea of death.

  Emerging from those intense hours, during which the senses and the soul had participated in a kind of great feast, Plato was seized by an imperious avidity to create, to stamp his seal on nature entire, to embrace the infinity of thought by means of his intelligence.

  Socrates is right, he thought. Amour ought to incite us to link a greater amity with wisdom, in order to progress in the integration of the universe.

  The young man climbed the rising path by which chariots entered the Acropolis.

  In matinal lightness, the city was still asleep. The frontons and the iridescent columns were scarcely designed. Plato sat down at the foot of the Propylaea, watching the accomplishment of the mystery of the sunrise, reflected in the distance on the ripples of the Saronic.

  The sea, the sky and the nascent light, stirring in the grandeur and beauty that they revealed, incited him to consider more intensely the task that was to orientate and elevate his existence: to explain the world, to give a meaning to life, to enlighten humans not with regard to their relationships with one another, like Solon, but with regard to their relationship with the ensemble.

  The figures of the great precursors who, in the isles of Ionia and the lands of Sicily or great Greece, had already tried to provide a response to the redoubtable and august problems of the universe, appeared before Plato.

  Three of them had dominated his mind intensely, and still did.

  Plunged in great thoughts, ready to open new and sublime routes to knowledge. Plato evoked those august initiators.

  First he saw, great among the great. Heraclitus, the descendant of kings, the great Ephesian who had retired from society, scorning glory and the purple, and only quit his retreat on the mountain in order to go and deposit his offering in the temple of Diana: a royal present, the true sign of his great lineage, his book, in which he had enclosed the flower of his meditations of genius.

  Then Plato thought of the living Apollo, the sage of Samos, the divine Pythagoras, the depositary of all the light of Asia, the inheritor of the revealed wisdom of sanctuaries, who, finding himself in communication with the harmonious spirit of things, read with ease the intimate arcana of nature.

  Finally, Plato saw the disciple of Xenophanes, Parmenides of Elea, the man who, going further and beyond appearances, wanted to pierce the essences, discover the unity, and cut the divine knot.

  Plato reviewed mentally the revelations that those three geniuses had brought to humans, the three responses that they had given to the enigma that the eternal Sphinx proposes to the living.

  “Nothing is, since nothing remains,” said the grim Ephesian. “Everything flows like water, everything is devoured as if by fire, incessantly transformed, passing and already passed, agonizing and already dead. No one crosses the same river twice, and even for the man crossing it the first time it no longer exists, since it changes during the crossing. Everything is in eternal motion, and nothing, at any moment, is the same as it was in the preceding moment, or will be in the next moment.

  “A perpetual flux, an incessant death: that is life; that is the fugitive spectacle—or, rather, the vain phantom—of the universe. Do not trust your senses, then, and do not stop at forms or substances. There are no fixed forms or permanent substances, but an eternal and mutable current, the current of annihilation, which precipitates incessantly in the bleak bed of the river of death.”

  Thus spoke Heraclitus.

  “What do things matter?” replied the Samian. “They are nothing but the servants of the eternal harmony that rules the Cosmos. The universe is order. And forgetting nature, you have only to open your intimate ear to the music that orchestrates the spheres, orders chaos, and regulates space and time in a
ccordance with divine laws. It is there that it is necessary to seek the universal soul of things, which is itself merely the reflection of a superior world from which everything comes and to which everything returns.

  “Thus, although forms pass, the harmony of the relationships that regulate them remains indestructible, escaping death, constituting a mystical knot, a divine number, which emerges from the universe like a mysterious murmur. Close your eyes, therefore, which can only see matter, and then, in the darkness and the silence, a supernatural light will shone upon you, a celestial melody will charm you, and you will perceive something of the world’s beyond, a reflection of the superior order, and Olympian glow, the true anticipation of immortality.”

  Thus spoke Pythagoras.

  And the Elean said:

  “I am burning with a desire for eternity. Beyond this variety, which dazzles my eyes when I contemplate the changing spectacle of the world, beyond the relationships and the harmony of things, I want to find the divine reality. That is the research of my unique, eternal, uncreated God, into which I am launching myself. From that, everything emanates, it alone is real, only it exists.

  “The absolute, such is my goal, such is my task. And it is by means of the absolute that I shall pass through the scale of beings. How can a human being be worthy of humanity except by wanting to discover that immutable center, distanced from the perpetual mutation of things, the eternal harbor where everything is calm, formless, colorless and changeless? God is my thought; it is God that will also be my permanent reverie.”

  Thus spoke Parmenides.

  And Plato, sitting on the stone, tried to reconcile those sublime responses, which surged from the human mind at grips with the eternal enigma.

  And while the intellectual enlightenments brought to the world by his predecessors traversed his mind, the great enlightenment of the sunrise also triumphed before his eyes. A flamboyant sword sprang from Pentelicus, reddening the earth, casting a vast frisson over the sea, putting an aureole of glory over the isle of Aegina, above which the sapphirine sky was paling. To the left, toward Sunium, the water seemed enameled by a florescence of mystical violets, while to the right, the Bay of Salamis, the sanctuary of the deliverance of Greece and the humiliation of the Mede, still retained its vestiges of shadow. But soon, the water there caught fire as well; a flood of gold steamed over the hills. Hymetta took on the color of dazzling hyacinths. One might have thought that a sudden fire was setting Attica ablaze, magnificently.

  Everything was joy now, everything quivering with life. It was as if the slaves that were going in the direction of Piraeus to turn the mills, and the flute-players returning from orgies, were all clad in a marvelous royal mantle by the splendid dawn.

  To put the same clarity and the same joy into human thought; to enable a ray of that solar light to penetrate into suffering hearts, to give human beings Hope and Beauty as divine assistants, to make the ideal spring forth like a divine auroral spring—such will be my work.

  Everything that Socrates had said the day before—his theory of remembrance, and his brilliant descriptions evoking a superior world in which the divine prototype was found of everything humans see down here—was organized in Plato’s mind, forming a harmonious cortege.

  I shall place on Olympus, not the abode of the gods, but the ideal fatherland of humankind, he thought. I shall remind my brethren of their celestial origins, convince them that their essence, although weighed down by the body, is a divine plant that finds itself momentarily distanced from its roots. And I shall give human beings as sublime instruments, capable of bringing them closer to the heavens from which they come and to which they will return, the beautiful, the good and virtue. To ennoble the earth, to purify the world, to inaugurate a grandiose effort toward perfection that will draw humans away from their miserable origins and divinize them: that will be the goal of my philosophy.

  And Plato saw that amour would be the center of his doctrine: amour, the mysterious spark clarifying origins and preparing ends.

  Plato went back down then, joyful and light, as if borne by winged spirits. He was conscious that, a divine workman, he was about to commence sculpting a monument as great and as durable as the one that Phidias had erected on the hill of Minerva.

  IX. Love and Death

  Spring was returning, and one afternoon in May, Socrates went into Plato’s house.

  “Put on your chlamys and follow me,” said the master. “Our friend Simon died last night, and it is appropriate, in accordance with the custom, that we go to salute his body before he disappears from the surface of the earth.”

  The disciple got dressed in haste, and followed Socrates,

  They both headed for the narrow streets neighboring the Ceramicus.

  “I saw him only yesterday,” said Plato. “He was standing outside his shop smiling at the little children who were going from door to door singing the praises the spring, in accordance with the custom in Rhodes. How can he no longer exist?”

  “He was passing, he has passed,” Socrates replied. “But I’m glad to know that he was smiling at children yesterday.”

  “That formed a gracious image: the old man, very thin, and the little ones surrounding him, singing and gamboling, with their thousand combined movements, which made them resemble a beehive. Simon gave them a honeyed cake, and they shared it out avidly, arguing, while praising the return of the beautiful season. Do you know the song in question, Socrates, so frank and so unpolished?”

  “Yes; it’s as frank and unpolished as the people who invented it,” said Socrates. “I sang it myself when I was very young, from door to door, with comrades:

  “She has come back, she is here again, the swallow, and with her the spring, the fine days. She is white underneath, as always, and black on top. Will you give us a fig from your lovely garden, or a ewe and wine, or a basket full of flour and cheese?

  “Shall we have something, or must we go? It would be good if your hand opened to give; otherwise, we won’t budge. Or we’ll take the door and the threshold and go into the depths of your house to abduct your little wife. She is small, easy to cry away, your little wife! Go on, don’t be difficult! Bring something, give us at least a piece of wood. But open your door to the swallow. Can’t you see that we’re children!”

  Socrates and Plato went into Simon’s house, from which rhythmic and tearful soft cries emerged, lamenting the deceased.

  Next to the humble bed on which Simon had rested from his cares, his labor and his eternal thought, the veil had been placed with which his face had been decently covered during the mysterious struggle of agony. The body lay there, clad in white, they feet turned toward the entrance, as was customary, with the eyes and mouth piously closed. Green garlands and wreaths of asphodel had been placed all round, as well as a bottle of perfume.

  Friends came to salute the remains while awaiting the burial, which, as usual, would take place at dawn, before the first rays of the sun.

  “He had a difficult life but he was hopeful,” said Socrates, pausing before the cadaver. “Poor but proud, he did not want to accept monetary aid from his friend Pericles. And in his dialogues, he only had tanners speak, wanting thus to honor his métier and ennoble it. I’m told that before his death he thanked heaven for having permitted him to be born a man rather than a beast, and a Greek rather than a barbarian.”

  Socrates and his disciple left the mortuary house after they had been sprinkled with water from a cypress branch in order to purify them. They hated almost instinctively toward the countryside and went out of the Thriasian Gate, the departure-point of the procession of the Panathenaia. Three roads opened before them there. They hesitated between the avenue of the Academy, shaded by pines and olive trees, which the Dionysian processions followed, and the Eleusinian Way.

  Finally, Socrates set off along the latter.

  “Let’s go visit the steadfast places where Simon will reside permanently tomorrow,” he said.

  Tombs were aligned alongs
ide the three rural routes, haunted by legend, which served as was places of celebration and ritual, and also amorous liaison, for there, near the tombs, courtesans came to line up in the evening, offering themselves to passers-by who had previously inscribed there the name of the one they desired and the price that they were able to pay.

  On the most ancient tombs, vases decorated with scenes of lamentation and farewell were rusting, while on the more recent ones marble steles sculpted in bas-relief rose up between monuments to soldiers who had died for the fatherland. And everywhere, the figures of sphinxes, sirens and lions loomed up, funerary guardians.

  Socrates gazed in a melancholy fashion at the scenes of supreme reunion ornamenting tombs, in which the deceased was representing sitting down, and then lying down, while his relatives surrounded him and saluted him standing up, since they still had to strive, to agitate and to struggle on the hard road of life. The master paused particularly before a bas-relief of a young woman, whom a humble disciple of Phidias had represented, choosing without melancholy or joy her favorite jewels from a casket held out to her by a slave.

  “They’re not sad and they’re not cheerful, the dead,” said Plato, thoughtfully.

  “Why would they be?” relied Socrates. “The artists have depicted them, rightly, tranquil and concentrated. They have only spread melancholy over the faces of those surrounding them and who are still ignorant of what the dead already know.”

  “Where might Simon be at this moment?” Plato asked then, without expecting a response.

  “Perhaps in nothingness—in which case, why worry about it? Or perhaps with the others, the great, the elect, in the society of Pericles, Themistocles, Sappho, Homer and Pythagoras, conversing with those who are definitively good, definitively wise, and definitively happy.”