by AM Kirkby
***
Karite's tale ended, and they sat in silence for a while. Egerius wasn't satisfied with it as a proof, and nor, he thought, would Kallirhoe be; but it was an undeniably powerful story.
Kallirhoe pulled the hem of her dress up, and scrambled to her feet.
"I thought we might drop in on Simonides," she said, "if he's still teaching."
Egerius followed her – odd how he seemed to be doing that more and more often these days; and Karite brought up the rear, since the Collatian girl had said she was needed at home.
Simonides seemed to have ended his work for the day, but there were still a couple of keen students chatting with him, one making an impassioned argument for the organisation of Sparta.
"You can have freedom or you can have glory; not both," he was saying. Simonides wasn't impressed by that argument, but he was – for once – getting the worst of it, till the older of the two spoke.
"I've fought in Greece and Gaul," he said; "I've commanded men, and led them to battle. And Sparta works; but not as well as freedom. Free men fight better."
That sounded as if it should have been the end of the argument; but Simonides wasted his advantage by reminding the former soldier that even if his men were free, he could hardly be fighting for liberty if he was fighting to defeat another city; so his troops were, after all, only equal to those of Sparta, despite their apparent freedom. To which the soldier had no answer but a disgusted look, and then, like shy sun after a rainstorm, a wry smile.
Again, as he so often did when Karite was talking about her ideas, he felt uneasy; he'd always reckoned himself one of the more thoughtful people he knew, but Karite and Simonides challenged him, questioned him, or worse, left him turning over those questions in his own head. What he'd believed as evident seemed to dissolve like morning mist in the sun. He'd always thought, if you fought against tyrants and injustice, that you were fighting a good fight; but it turned out that it was more complicated than that, that the very act of fighting, of turning to force rather than reasoned debate, was itself a style of unfreedom... Then he remembered Simonides' ridiculous display of the afternoon, and grinned. He might not grasp the most advanced thinking, but at least he didn't look stupid.
"Simonides..." He kept his voice level; a casual remark, nothing special. The Greek looked over.
"What were you doing this afternoon?"
"Teaching, I suppose." Simonides frowned. "Teaching this evening, anyway... Oh! Yes, I was carrying out an experiment earlier on."
"An … experiment?"
"Well," said Simonides, drawing a large breath, "I have been interested for some while in how our bodies work, so to speak. We do things without knowing that we are doing them; for instance when you pick up a wine cup, you carry out a complex set of manoeuvres without thinking about any of them. You move your arm and hand towards the cup, you grasp the cup, and when your fingers tell you that you hold it firmly, you bring the cup towards your mouth; and you do all this while you're talking to me, or to Kallirhoe, or while you're thinking about something completely different. So I wondered what would happen if instead of doing such a movement unconsciously, I tried to think about it, to analyse it into its constituent movements, right down to the smallest single motion. You understand?"
"So you went to the river and tried to fall over."
"I was learning to walk."
"But you can walk already!" said the younger student. It took him a couple of seconds to realise his mistake; that they weren't talking about what he was talking about at all.
"I thought about how we walk. And the more I thought about it, the less I was able to do it. That's interesting; there are limits to our thought. Or perhaps not limits; eventually I was able to walk consciously, willing every movement, doing nothing without thinking. Even balancing, I was conscious of the way my weight shifted, using my arms extended to balance my body, or putting the weight on one leg rather than the other. So it's not an absolute limit; but it's difficult. Very difficult."
"Isn't it easier just to trust to instinct?" Egerius asked.
"Maybe easier. But … what is instinct, anyway? Who here remembers learning to walk?"
Of course no one did. Impossible to think back so far, when earliest memories are either so vague as to be useless – a brooding presence, a glimpse of light – or come from so much later in childhood.
"We could watch children learning. But how do we know what they are thinking? All we can see is what they do. And we can see the fact that they are thinking, perhaps. Little squashed up faces full of concentration. But it's impossible to know what those thoughts are."
"You could ask," the student said.
Simonides snorted a laugh. "If a child that age had the right vocabulary, we could ask. But I don't think we'd get much of an answer."
"I wonder if that's why we don't remember it." That was the ex-soldier, surprisingly. Simonides looked at him, questioning, and he frowned for a moment, then continued. "We don't remember it, because we didn't have the words to explain to ourselves what we were doing. And so because we can't tell it, we don't remember it."
A small silence passed over them. It was as if they were all trying to remember; Egerius knew he was, thinking back, trying to sort out those confused impressions of his youth and determine which of them was definitively the first one, the first moment of his life that he could actually remember, as if being alive had counted for nothing till he came to a moment that he could scratch into his memory like a notch on wood.
"I can remember learning to write," Kallirhoe offered. "But then, I learned that rather late. It was strange, breaking a word into its sounds. And if you could break a word up, then you could rearrange it, backwards, or syllable by syllable, randomly."
"Did you ever have to write the same word, over and over again?" That was the soldier. "It's weird. After a while, the word seems to change, and keep changing, and it doesn't mean anything any more; it becomes an incantation, something magical or absurd."
And through all this discussion Egerius was thinking; I'm wasting my time. All my time taken up with administration, with problems, with planning building works, dealing with the bruised dignity of a settler asked to work on earth moving rather than in the government of the city, or a collapsed drain that had to be excavated again and shored up, or a quarrel between the buyer and seller of a horse that turned out to be vicious. This mounting pile of smallness. Like water seeping into a pool; it wasn't a flood, nothing so dramatic, you couldn't drown in it, you didn't see it coming, but then you realised it had filled your life silently – there was open sea all around you, you were lost, every landmark washed away. The bright vision of the new city had been swallowed up; he had been swallowed up.
"But what do you really remember? Or remember truly?" Simonides was saying. "Can you be absolutely sure about what you've remembered, or does the mere fact that you're remembering it change it?"
"Or change you, perhaps," Karite added.
He'd missed too much to make sense of the conversation. He turned to go.