A personal letter on some of my own anxieties.
S.R.,
Some nights, in the late hours, when the streets are desolate or sparsely populated, lying in bed, awake, I am arrested by the thought, one which I confess with some amusing levity, that I don’t know how to form particular niceties of Ancient Greek syntax.
That (if you’ll bear with me) the future less vivid conditional construction is formed by the verb, in its optatival form, in the protasis (the_if_ clause), and the optatival mood in the apodosis (the_then_ clause).
That the gist of the conditional is, “If X should happen (which, it is unlikely that it should happen, though possible), Y would happen (but this is unlikely, though possible)”.
This puerile anxiety extends itself to other areas:
That there seems to be so little time for
And that I waste much of that time, knowing how little there is left.
That I don’t know what purpose there is to the lives that we live, that I’m baffled as to where to begin, and harangued by the idea that perhaps to ask the question of purpose is to ask the wrong question entirely.
That there are a thousand questions to which I have no answer, and may never have one.
Though I call these thoughts collectively by the term “anxiety” (which, admittedly, they are all anxieties), I think that they’re much better off being referred to as forms of “longing,” and that, in a general sense, they are all informed by a longing to know.
I had, over the course of this summer, the leisure to translate Plato’s Phaedo. And in it I read something that spoke much to my initial attraction, both to philosophy and to Plato, and which adequately described a longing I’ve noticed in myself for some time. One which, as of recent, has become ever-increasingly conspicuous in my current state of restlessness. Allow me to quote a better translation than my own:
“Where then, Socrates,” said he (Cebes), “shall we find a good singer of such charms [of death, anxiety, etc.], since you are leaving us?’’
“Hellas, Cebes,” he replied, “is a large country, in which there are many good men, and there are many foreign peoples also. You ought to search through all of them in quest of such a charmer, sparing neither money nor toil, for there is no greater need for which you could spend your money. And you must seek among yourselves, too, for perhaps you would hardly find others better able to do this than you.“
(Phaedo 78a, translated by Harold North Fowler)
Out in the city streets, at times in late hours, the night seems to sprawl and gape, and the buildings tower and streets stretch. And I feel that I can go anywhere, do anything, meet anyone. That just around the bend there is some new insight to be gleaned, face to be seen, word to be spoken.
I am often gripped by moments of intense longing.
That fundamentally this longing, like a hunger, or a thirst, is a searching after something, and yet that something (if I could guess), is not something the world could never sate, neither anything nor anyone in it.
I wish, I suppose, that there were some Socrates to whom I could attach myself. That there were “such a charmer” of these minute anxieties and burning questions. That someone could give me answers to which I could cling tenaciously, and subsequently abandon all of these worries.
Perhaps there is, and I’ve simply been looking in the wrong place this entire time.
— And what, you ask, do I have to show for all this longing?
That’s a good question.
Sincerely,
George