Eight of Diamonds

… We are conjured up
and tricked away …

O nce again we strolled through the grand entrance of the Acropolis, and Dad stood for a long time looking down over the town.

He pointed to a hill called Areopagus. The apostle Paul had once delivered a great speech to the Athenians there about an unknown God who didn’t live in a temple built by human hands.

The ancient market square of Athens was situated below Areopagus and was called the agora. The great philosophers had walked and meditated along the colonnades, but now ruins lay where magnificent temples, official buildings, and courtrooms had once stood. The only thing left standing on a small hill is the ancient marble temple of Hephaestus, the god of fire and metalworkers.

‘We’d better make our way down, Hans Thomas,’ Dad said. ‘For me this is what it must be like for a Muslim to arrive in Mecca. The only difference is that my Mecca lies in ruins.’

I think he was afraid the agora would be a big disappointment, but when we hustled into the ancient market square and started to clamber among the blocks of marble, he soon managed to revive the culture of the old city. He was helped along by a couple of good books about Athens.

There were hardly any people here. There had been thousands of people milling around up at the Acropolis, but here there were only a couple of jokers who showed up now and again.

I remember thinking that if it were true, as some people claimed, that you have several lifetimes, then Dad would have been walking around this square a thousand years ago. When he spoke about life in ancient Athens, it was as if he ‘remembered’ how everything had been.

My suspicions were confirmed when he suddenly stopped, pointed across the ruins, and said, ‘A young child sits building sandcastles in a sandbox. It constantly builds something new, something which it treasures for only a moment before it knocks it all down again. In the same way Time has been given a planet to play with. This is where the history of the world is written, this is where the events are engraved – and smoothed over again. This is where life bubbles like in a witch’s cauldron. One day we’ll be modelled here, too – from the same brittle material as our ancestors. The wind of Time blows through us, carries us and is us – then drops us again. We are conjured up and tricked away. There is always something lying and brewing in anticipation of taking our place. Because we’re not standing on solid ground, we’re not even standing on sand – we are sand.’

His words frightened me, not only his choice of words but also the powerful way in which he said them.

He went on: ‘You cannot hide from Time. You can hide from kings and emperors, and possibly from God, but you can’t hide from Time. Time follows our every move, because everything around us is immersed in this transient element.’

I nodded seriously, but Dad had only just begun his long lecture on the ravages of time.

‘Time doesn’t pass, Hans Thomas, and Time doesn’t tick. We are the ones who pass, and our watches tick. Time eats its way through history as silently and relentlessly as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. It topples great civilisations, gnaws at ancient monuments, and wolfs down generation after generation. That’s why we speak of the “ravages of time.” Time chews and chomps – and we are the ones between its jaws.’

‘Is that what the old philosophers talked about?’ I asked.

He nodded and continued: ‘For a fleeting moment, we are part of a furious swarm. We run around on earth as though it was the most obvious thing of all. You saw how the ants crawled and crept up at the Acropolis! But everything will disappear. It will disappear and be replaced with new multitudes, because people are always standing in line. Shapes and masks come and go, and new ideas are always popping up. Themes are never repeated, and a composition never shows up twice … There is nothing as complicated and precious as a person, my boy – but we are treated like trash.’

I thought this lecture was so pessimistic that at last I dared to make a little comment. ‘Are things really so bleak?’

‘Wait,’ he interrupted, before I’d had a chance to finish what I was going to say. ‘We skip around on earth like characters in a fairy tale. We nod and smile at each other as if to say, “Hi there, we’re living at the same time! We’re in the same reality – or the same fairy tale …” Isn’t that incredible, Hans Thomas? We live on a planet in the universe, but soon we’ll be swept out of orbit again. Abracadabra – and we’re gone.’

I sat looking at him. There was nobody I knew better, and nobody I loved more, but something strange had come over him while he stood here surveying the marble blocks in the old square in Athens. It wasn’t Dad speaking; I thought he had been possessed by Apollo or some kind of demon.

‘If we had lived in another century,’ he went on, ‘we would have shared our lives with different people. Today we can easily nod and smile and say hello to thousands of our contemporaries: “Hi, there! How strange we should be living at exactly the same time.” Or perhaps I bump into someone and open a door and shout: “Hi, soul!”’

He demonstrated with both hands how he could open the door to his soul.

‘We’re alive, you know, but we live this only once. We open our arms and declare that we exist, but then we are swept aside and thrust into the depths of history. Because we are disposable. We are part of an eternal masquerade where the masks come and go. But we deserve more, Hans Thomas. You and I deserve to have our names engraved into something eternal, something that won’t be washed away in the great sandbox.’

He sat on a block of marble catching his breath. Only now did I understand that Dad had spent a long time preparing the speech he would give here in the ancient square in Athens. In this way he had also taken part in the ancient philosophers’ discussions.

He wasn’t really talking to me; everything was directed at the great Greek philosophers. Dad’s speech was addressed to a distant past.

I still wasn’t a fully fledged philosopher, but I thought I was entitled to give my opinion all the same.

‘Don’t you think there might be something which isn’t washed away in the great sandbox?’

He turned around, and for the first time he spoke to me. I think I woke him from a deep trance.

‘Here,’ he said, and pointed to his head. ‘There’s something in here which can’t be washed away.’

For a moment I was worried he’d become a megalomaniac, but he wasn’t really just pointing to his own head.

‘Thoughts don’t flow, Hans Thomas. You see, I have sung only the first verse. The philosophers in Athens believed that there was also something which didn’t run. Plato called this the “world of ideas”. The sandcastle isn’t the most important thing. What is most important is the image of a sandcastle which the child had pictured before it started to build. Why do you think the child knocks the castle down as soon as it is finished?’

I had to admit I understood the first verse better than the second, but then he said, ‘Have you ever wanted to draw or make something but you just haven’t been able to get it right? You try over and over again, without giving up. It is because the image you have in your head is always more complete than the representations you try to form with your hands. It’s the same with everything we see around us. We think everything could be better, and do you know why we do that, Hans Thomas?’

I just shook my head. By now he was so excited that he started to whisper. ‘It’s because all the images inside our heads have come from the world of ideas. That’s where we really belong, you know – not down here in the sandbox, where time snaps at everything we love.’

‘So there is another world, then?’

Dad nodded secretively. ‘It was our soul before it lodged itself in a body, and it will return there when the body succumbs to the ravages of time.’

‘Is that true?’ I said, looking up at him in awe.

‘Well, that’s what Plato thought. Our bodies have the same fate as the sandcastles in the sandbox, nothing can be done about it. But we do have something which time can’t gnaw through. That’s because it doesn’t really belong here. We need to look up from everything flowing around us and see what it is all a representation of.’

I hadn’t understood everything Dad had said, but I did understand that philosophy was an enormous thing and Dad was an enormous philosopher. I also felt as though I had made closer contact with the ancient Greeks. I realised that what I had seen today was more or less all that was left of the Greeks’ worldly goods, but that their thoughts were as resilient as ever.

To conclude, Dad pointed to the place where Socrates had been imprisoned. He had been charged with leading young people astray, and died after being made to drink a vial of deadly poison. Of course, in truth he was the only joker in Athens at that time.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28