Travels with Epicurus (4 page)

Treating someone as an end rather than as a means turns out to be as much a treat for us as for the person to whom we are relating. Tasso does not want anything from his friend the fisherman except his company. He does not want him to tighten up his summary of a case before the court, as he frequently desired a lawyer to do during his days on the bench. Tasso feels no need to manipulate, exploit, or in any way maneuver his fisherman-companion to do anything. No, Tasso simply wants his friend to
be
with him. He wants him to share conversation, laughter, a hand of
prefa
, and, perhaps most important, to share the silence when they both gaze out at the sea. Epicureans consider communal silence a hallmark of true friendship.

For an old man with the world of “everyday affairs and politics” behind him, this kind of camaraderie is the greatest gift. It is a gift that rarely, if ever, is fully available to the forever youngsters still immersed in their careers.

—

Companionship was at the top of Epicurus's list of life's pleasures. He wrote, “Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”

It may come as a shock to the well-heeled members of the New England Epicurean Society, an exclusive dining club that favors caviar and oysters at its black-tie dinners, but Epicurus believed that choosing with whom one eats dinner is far more significant than choosing what the menu should be. “Before you eat or drink anything, carefully consider with whom you eat or drink rather than what you eat or drink, because eating without a friend is the life of the lion or the wolf.”

By the joys of friendship, Epicurus meant a full range of ­human interactions ranging from intimate and often philosophical discussions with his dearest companions—the kind he enjoyed at the long dining table in the Garden—to impromptu exchanges with people, known and unknown, in the street. The education or social status of those with whom he conversed mattered not a whit; in fact the height of true friendship was to be accepted and loved for who one was, not what station in life one had achieved. Loving and being loved affirmed one's sense of self and conquered feelings of loneliness and alienation. It kept one sane.

If this prescription for happiness sounds like the drivel of popular songs (in my youth, Nat King Cole's hit-parade rendition of “Nature Boy” concluded, “The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return”), so be it. It may still happen to be true. The philosopher from Samos was certainly convinced it was true. And there is no doubting friendship's unique availability in the years when politics and commerce are behind us.

My lifelong friend and frequent cowriter, Tom Cathcart, and I have always gotten a big kick out of striking up conversations with strangers we meet on trains and planes, in bookstores, on neighboring park benches. Tom has a particular talent for drawing personal stories from these people, and we both love hearing them. But far more valuable to us than the entertainment of the stories is the connection made with another human being. It is a comfort like no other. It is the comfort of personal communion.

Now that Tom and I are old men and look it—we are both balding, with gray beards—we find that making these impromptu connections happens more easily. It took us a while to figure out why this was so, and when we did, we had a good laugh: old guys are unthreatening. We don't look like we are up to no good, for the simple reason that we don't look like we are
capable
of inflicting any no-goodness—well, other than being seriously boring. It was a bittersweet moment when we realized that none of the women with whom we initiated conversations suspected for a minute that we were coming on to them. Heartbreaking to admit, but they were right.

ON THE COMFORT OF COMMISERATION IN OLD AGE

At Tasso's table, the retired teacher has asked to skip the next hand of cards. He needs to pee, the third time in the past hour. It's his damned prostate gland, he moans. His companions tease him. The fisherman says his friend's prostate is so big he could use it for bait to catch a shark. The teacher stalks off to the WC, grumbling, and I am reminded of Montaigne's recommendation to vigorously gripe about illnesses.

Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French essayist, was well acquainted with Epicurus's ideas. Recapping the Greek philosopher's pleasure calculus, he wrote, “And with Epicurus, I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.” Like Epicurus, Montaigne was convinced that friendship, and the good conversation that comes with it, was the greatest pleasure available to us. In his essay “Of Vanity,” the French philosopher wrote:
“I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other
.
”

Montaigne wrote at length about old age and, in one piece, he suggests that complaining to friends about the infirmities of old age is the best medicine: “If the body find itself relieved by complaining, let it complain; if agitation ease it, let it tumble and toss at pleasure; if it seem to find the disease evaporate (as some physicians hold that it helps women in delivery) in making loud outcries, or if this do but divert its torments, let it roar as it will.”

Thus Montaigne insists that if we don't let it all hang out in front of our friends, we are cheating ourselves out of one of an old person's best palliatives—all in the name of some kind of dumb propriety. These days, in some circles of old folks, this recapitulation of complaints is known as “the organ recital,” and, God knows, it does “divert [the] torments,” at least for a bit.

ON FACING DEATH BLISSFULLY

The sun has begun its descent, appearing to enlarge as it nears the horizon and to dim as its rays gradually become eclipsed by our planet. Its refracted beams cast a pale, rose-colored glow onto the water, and all four men at Tasso's table suspend their conversation to watch daylight's finale.

Epicurus was not afraid of death. He famously said, “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not. The absence of life is not evil; death is no more alarming than the nothingness before birth.”

Later philosophers, especially Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian, took exception to Epicurus's dictum, finding it simplistic. After all “when we are” we are still
conscious
of the fact that in the future we will no longer be, and that makes one hell of a difference. In fact, according to Kier­kegaard, it is enough to strike a man, young or old, with “fear and trembling.”

Although all the men at Tasso's table are at least nominally Greek Orthodox Christians, a religion that promises a beatific afterlife to the godly, my guess is that, like most mortals, they are not entirely immune to this terror. Nonetheless they would recognize the comfort in Epicurus's dying words to his friend Idomeneus: “On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury [bladder spasms] and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them; but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations.”

Chapter Two

The Deserted Terrace

ON TIME AND WORRY BEADS

S
een from the sea, Hydra seems as flimsy as a hallucination. A lucent mist envelopes the island, and the incoming hydrofoil throws up a spray that further filters its landscape, softens it, makes it appear to float. But here on the island, even when the sky is as cloudy as it is today, every view is severe with detail. The shadow of a rock a mile off on the Peloponnesian shore appears as well defined as the lemon tree just outside my window. And because Hydra rises from its main port in a steep, horseshoe-shaped hill that is girded with houses, everyone is an innocent spectator to private scenes in remote courtyards and terraces.

At this moment I spy a middle-aged woman in a floral-­patterned housecoat hanging out her laundry while carrying on a lively conversation with a brown-and-white cat perched on her garden wall; two terraces above her, I see a pair of grade school children sitting cross-legged under their garden door's awning, one pulling a picture book from his backpack, the other biting into a chunk of bread slathered with honey; and at the top of the hill, I can clearly make out a tall and portly Orthodox priest in black robe and chimney-pot hat sitting stoically on his garden bench while his diminutive wife, standing just behind him, lectures him, possibly about some item he failed to purchase on his morning trip to the port.

This is the celebrated trick of Hydra light: it transforms daily life into intimate theater.

In the whitewashed nineteenth-century house where I am staying, all the windows are screened with two crossed iron bars. “To keep the Turks out,” some islanders say. “To keep Albanian pirates out,” say others. Clearly these iron bars work: neither Turk nor Albanian has clambered into my room. The bars do not obscure the view from my desk window; rather they frame it into four discrete images: a hill studded with houses in one frame, a grove of almond trees in another, the harbor, the sea.

My lodging is high on the hill. Through the harbor frame, I now view the terrace of Dimitri's taverna, and it is empty. The clouds threaten rain, so I imagine that Tasso and his tablemates are either inside the café or skipping today's symposium.

But rain or not, I am hungry. As the figs in the hanging mesh basket in my room are in that awkward stage between fresh and dried, I set off for Dimitri's taverna, passing Tasso's house along the way. I catch a glimpse of him, sitting alone on his third-story terrace, where he appears deep in thought.

—

The only people inside Dimitri's are Dimitri himself, sitting in the kitchen and listening to the BBC World Service news and, at the far end of the dining area, by the window, his eighty-year-old father, Ianos, who is reading yesterday's Athenian newspaper while playing with his
kombolói
, a loop of thirty-three amber beads that are known in English as worry beads.

Like many of the island's men, Dimitri was a sailor when he was younger. He worked his way up to ship's radio operator, a job at which he picked up fluent English and a smattering of other languages, both Western and Eastern. When he reached his midthirties, he returned permanently to Hydra, opened his taverna, and married the local woman he had hired as his cook. The idea that life has natural, discrete stages comes intuitively to Dimitri.

I realize I have seen far fewer men fingering worry beads than when I first came to the island in the 1960s, and I ask Dimitri if that tradition is fading. Before responding, he signals for me to select my meal from the open metal trays at the front of the kitchen. As always I have a choice between moussaka, stuffed zucchinis, pastitsio (a Greek macaroni and cheese, with ground meat, which got its name from the Italian
pasticcio
, meaning “hodgepodge,” a term that could describe most Greek dishes), and Dimitri's pièce de résistance, roasted lamb with potatoes. I spring for the lamb, despite the fact that a small party of flies is cavorting in its gravy. Dimitri turns off the radio, serves me up a generous platter of the lamb, pours two glasses of retsina, and sits down across from me.

“To start with, ‘worry beads' is an ignorant translation,” he begins. “It says more about the way English people think than it does about the Greeks.
Kombolói
have nothing to do with ­worrying.”

Whenever Dimitri and I have these conversations, he assumes a teacherly air with more than a hint of strained patience, but nonetheless it is clear to me that he enjoys his role as my cultural interpreter. He is, in fact, an unusually astute and cosmopolitan man.

“
Kombolói
have to do with time, with spacing it out, making it last,” he goes on.

Spacing time out? Making it last? Like many Greeks I know, Dimitri slips naturally into metaphysical pronouncements, although he certainly would not call them that. Dimitri is simply expressing his worldview, and that worldview sees time as a malleable thing, multidimensional, based not just on planetary movements and clocks but also on the way we personally apprehend it. So for him, time can shift depending on how a person experiences it, even by how he
chooses
to experience it.

In modern philosophy, the idea that time is not solely a linear, measurable, objective thing was considered a radical ­concept when twentieth-century existentialists and phenomenologists resolved to give top billing to
subjective
perceptions of time. Reacting to the primacy of the scientific worldview, these philosophers argued that the way we
experience
time is ultimately more relevant to a human philosophy. In effect, they were elevating Dimitri's natural sense of the nature of time to a philosophical paradigm.

Phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl introduced the idea of “lived time,” contrasting it with “clock time,” that is, objective, scientific time. In their view, lived time is basic because we are “time-bound” beings, aware that our lives have a time limit. We measure time in personal, idiosyncratic ways. Concepts like “now” and “not yet” and “waiting forever” vary in meaning from one individual to another and, for that matter, from one time to another. If I say, “The years certainly do go by faster as I get older,” it does not do much for me if someone responds, “But you know, of course, that the years
really
go by at exactly the same speed as always.” I know perfectly well how fast those years
really
went by.

It is little wonder that Dimitri easily distinguishes between clock time and lived time. In the ancient Greek language, the two concepts deserved two different words:
Chrónos
denotes the dimension of time, its duration, which moves steadily from future to present to past; the kind of time referred to when one says, for example, “I'll meet you in the port at high noon.”
Kairós
denotes the quality of time rather than its quantity, in particular an
opportune
time, like “the perfect time to take stock of my life.”
Kairós
describes time's particular significance for an individual; it is time that has personal meaning as compared to universal dimension.

In her provocative book-length essay
Time
, another paperback I packed in my suitcase, Eva Hoffman illustrates how the experience of time varies from culture to culture and from one period to another in a particular culture. Hoffman quotes a ­Romanian poet on how time felt to her in the late twentieth century: “For more than thirty years I lived in the opaque world of communism, where time had no value. All we had left was talking. Our conversations, sometimes delightful, were a never-ending chatter over full ashtrays and cheap bottles of alcohol, night-long discussions, and hung-over mornings. Time was frozen for us. We weren't in a hurry to get anywhere.”

Life on Hydra is lived andante, no matter what the political situation in Athens. There are no roads or cars here, so the primary means of locomotion—walking and riding a donkey—set the lived-time tempo; they define the parameters of fast and slow. Here nothing can speed by outside the window of a motor vehicle, so there are no fragmentary scenes of faces and objects that remain perpetually unfinished, no mosaics forever missing critical tiles.

Because the island is a string of mountains and the terrain is rocky down to the shore, the pathways are mostly steps up and down, making walking relatively slow, both to avoid stumbling and to conserve energy. And because these paths twist sharply around boulders and houses, the passing view is divided into complete and comprehensible scenes. In only a matter of a few calendar days here, my internal clock adopts this tempo, and along with that comes a slowed-down appreciation of just about everything—of what I hear and see around me and of the feeling of the movements of my body.

Old people move slowly. Our rocky terrain is internal—fragile bones, faltering muscles, weakened hearts. As our slowness is a result of these failings, it is often viewed as a failing too—our feebleness on slow-motion display.

But simply because we old folks are forced into slower ­movements—as, for different reasons, Hydriots are—does that mean it is not a good thing? Being in this place where my old man's gait is matched step-by-step all around me, I now realize that I habitually fight against a leisurely pace; I resist giving in to slowness. This has been yet another of my unconscious conformities to the “forever young” ethos. Yet now it seems quite clear to me that slowness has extraordinary virtues.

Moving slowly has a grace to it that I find I can easily settle into. I feel fluent in slow motion. There is even something aesthetic about it, a flowing quality reminiscent of a tai chi ­sequence yet without that exercise's strict discipline. At times, climbing unhurriedly out of my chair, first testing my balance, then rising carefully to my feet and walking in measured steps to the window, I feel like I am performing an old man's natural, graceful dance. Impulse and movement match. Yes, I am giving in to a limitation of old age, but it does not feel like a defeat at all. In fact, sometimes it feels downright dignified.

Epicurus would have us savor each moment of our lives to the maximum, and fully savoring our experiences requires time. Sure, one reason I chew this chunk of Dimitri's lamb slowly is because of my erratic dentures. But this slow chewing also adds to my delight in this morsel; slowness is its relish.

In her essay on time, Hoffman contrasts slow “lived time” with her first experience of American time when she immigrated to the United States: “It was not only that time moved faster in America—it pressed onwards in more stressful ways.” She observed American time's relationship to American anxiety: “Everyone suffered from the stress of not doing enough, or the possibility of doing more, or at least feeling good or guilty about it.”

It is this time pressing onward that the forever young often choose as their “lived time,” the tempo they set for the final stage of their lives. Indeed, from this viewpoint lived time may press onward with particular urgency, the urgency that comes from the knowledge that we are running out of time; we experience a kind of panicky
kairós
.

ON BOREDOM IN OLD AGE

The forever young have a compelling reason for opting for ­hurried time: it is their primary strategy for combating time's chronic tormentor—boredom. And next to illness and death, boredom is what we fear most in old age.

Nothing appears quite so potentially boring as being an old man without any new goals or upcoming exciting experiences, an old man without the buzz of a hungry libido, an old man whose energy level is gradually sinking to the point where the prospect of camping out in the woods seems more like an ordeal than recreation. And added to this is the fact that inevitably—the gatherings on Dimitri's terrace notwithstanding—an old man finds himself alone more often than ever before in his life. Lots of time, nothing to do. The blankness of boredom.

Another book I packed for this trip was
A Philosophy of Boredom
, by the Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, and it was well worth the space it took up in my baggage. It is that rare book of contemporary philosophy that combines keen scholarship with a sympathetic concern for the stuff we ordinary humans worry about.

Svendsen points out that boredom is a relatively new idea that arose out of late-eighteenth-century romanticism and its emphasis on the primacy of the individual. Instead of contentedly accepting their role in society and its traditions, people were urged by the romantic ideal to create their individual identity and, along with that, their own meaning of life. The drawback, writes Svendsen, is that “a society that functions well promotes man's ability to find meaning in the world; one that functions badly does not. In premodern societies there is usually a collective meaning that is sufficient. For us ‘Romantics,' things are more problematic.” Meaning does not come easily, or even at all, to many of us, especially to those of us who have lost a secure connection to a traditional God and religion.

In “existential boredom,” as compared to “situational boredom” (for example, the feeling that overcomes me while sitting for two hours in the waiting room of my urologist), a person is locked inside a self that cannot find meaning in anything at all, a self that often has given up even trying to find meaning in anything. It is that feeling of pervasive emptiness best captured by the French word
ennui
, a word that gained popularity in English via Cole Porter's song “I Get a Kick Out of You”:

But practically everything leaves me totally cold.

The only exception I know is the case

Where I'm out on a quiet spree

Fighting vainly the old ennui. . . .

With nothing meaningful in life, nothing is interesting. ­Enter boredom. A bored man even longs for longing. He has time to fill, but there is nothing compelling to do. He is bored to death. Those of us prone to melancholy are all too familiar with the feeling of existential boredom.