John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“That’s the trouble,” he said. “Coherence.”

I smiled. He liked me. Ah!

His eyes snapped over to me, then away again, and he tipped his head back, thinking out his phrases. It hit me that he too was showing off. I was honored. “There’s a sense in which everything has to balance,” he said. His right hand peeled away like a seagull, illustrating balance. “The world’s a great big clutter of truths, some of them conflicting but all of them true. Each truth is a kind of stern god. Turn your back on one—” His hands danced out, turned their backs.

The priest beside him shook his head sadly, a little drunk. “We must not presume,” he said. He had a weak chin.

Dorkis ignored him by nodding agreement, a favorite trick of his, I learned. He opened his arms with loving-kindness for the whole world. “Pursue one single truth, never glancing to left or right, and pow!” Light sparkled from his eyes with the word, the boxer’s pow of his fist. He was glorious, bright as a thousand garnets. He could have said “Circles are square” and I would have been hurled to the highest reaches of philosophy. I drank and filled my cup. “There’s a sense in which nothing is true,” he said. “Triangles, for instance. All the laws of geometry fail when you try to draw a triangle on a round pot. The sum of the angles changes, or else the lines aren’t straight.” He hunched his shoulders, more like a wrestler than like a potter, laughing with delight at the difficulty of life and pretending to struggle over lines on the side of his cup.

“It’s simple,” I said. “You smash the pot and draw in the rubble.”

He laughed. “To Lykourgos!” We drank.

“That’s the way it is,” he said. “Life. Experience. It’s like something alive, forever changing its shape. There’s a sense in which as soon as you learn its laws it’s become something else. It wreaks havoc on ethical theories.”

I laughed, merely from good humor. If I wanted to be hypercritical, I might have observed that Dorkis was inclined to be sententious.

“Everything’s air,” he said. “The breath of God.” With this phrase he again opened his arms wide, like a man just home from the city calling his animals; and I laughed.

The priest smiled and nodded to show he was awake. He looked puzzled, however.

Dorkis said, “You have to ride it, like a bird.”

“That’s so,” I said. I realized with pleasure that I was drunk on two cups, and the whole evening lay before me like a meadow. “Ethics,” I said, “is some theory a man imposes on the world. A man makes up a set of rules, or some fool priest makes up the rules—” I wagged my finger at the priest. “And you try to make the rules inside you fit what’s outside. If the world outside is nothing like what your rules say, or if it fits your rules on Tuesday but then on Wednesday it changes…” (This was not my usual view, but I was pleased by it, and I’ve held it ever since, for sentimental reasons.)

The priest shook his head and waved his cup. “I’m sorry, but you’re both quite mistaken.”

“Priests would be beggars if people weren’t always mistaken,” Dorkis said.

The cheerful talk went on through dinner, some splendid thoroughly unspartan meal I no longer remember except in isolated images: my wife, Tuka, gleaming, talking with fine wicked wit about Korinth; some fat, dark lady who looked like a grackle bending her head to hear what the testy man said through the side of his mouth; Iona holding up a wide clay black-figured dish as if doing a dance with the cluster of shadows on the white stone wall behind her. Dorkis and I shouted, telling stories with obscure points. His teeth and slanted eyes glinted, the muscles of his cheeks bunched up like fists, his hands flew wildly, now like a boxer’s, now like some delicate artisan’s. The drunker he got, the keener his mind became, it seemed to me. I grew duller, but I made up for it in noise. At some point I slept.

Later he sat on the soft couch with his arm around Tuka, his hand on her breast. She talked lightly, cleverly about silversmiths, and Dorkis laughed till tears came, ravished by her brilliance — the quick, dingy wit, the lightning-fast plasticity of face, the clowning body. He clung to her tightly, head against her shoulder. I was a little surprised by all this, but it seemed not unnatural. I went outside. The trees went round and round like big black chariots.

I stood for some minutes sucking in the air, trying to get my mind clear, and then I walked out into the garden, momentarily convinced that I was interested in vegetables and flowers. I picked a leaf and held it up against the moon. Awe went through me like a pain, and then, for some reason, I lost interest. I urinated. When I returned to the back steps of the house Iona was leaning against a pillar as if with native and accidental grace.

“You have lovely breasts,” I said. “I couldn’t help but notice.”

She smiled. I was full of woe.

“Come roll with me in the garden,” I said. I put my hand on the pillar she leaned on, and she smiled again, studying my face.

“If I followed my inclinations—” she said. She remembered the cup in her hand and took a sip.

I put my hand on hers and she looked down. For an instant my mind cleared. She was confused, less certain of the game than I had imagined — or was she acting? She filled my mind with jungles. Birds and tigers. I was tempted to press her and perhaps I would have, but Tuka was standing in the low, square doorway, her skin white against the black of her hair and dress. She was smiling the slightly crooked smile she gets when she’s had too, much to drink, and she was looking at us up- from-under like a bull. It struck me with terrific force that Tuka looked like Lykourgos.

“Let’s go home,” she said.

We went.

Stories, stupidities — he never lets up! The ephors came this morning, three of them, to collect our writing. I gave them nothing, though I wanted to. The old man’s talk about why they collect the stuff got to me. Agathon gave them a big messy pile of things — stupid damn drawings of dogs.

I was afraid when they came — all those guards and people with banners and all those swords — but when they’d stood there at the cell door a little while, talking with the jailer, asking whether we were eating and how we were sleeping nights, I began to feel less afraid. Agathon sat at the table serene as a mountain, smiling at them the way he’d have smiled at a delegation of children, and when they spoke to him he would answer as if they’d asked some other question, like a deaf man. Their spokesman — I didn’t hear any of their names — was a tall man with pale-blue eyes, young for a man with so much power. His legs were hairless, like a young boy’s, and pale from his spending all his time indoors. He stood with his head thrown forward a little, like an important man being taken on a tour of a city’s defenses. He had a sharp mind, you could see at a glance, but what he might be thinking was as obscure as old astrologers’ charts. He glanced through Agathon’s drawings and didn’t smile.

When I saw they were about to turn away I said, “Sir!” The spokesman turned back with his eyebrow lifted, impersonal and polite. “Son?” he said. I was moved — all choked up — at his calling me son. A feeling went through me, like the shock from an eel, that I could trust him. Why would he be here visiting us if he didn’t care that we got justice? And the way he stood, perfectly erect, not slouching the way some tall men do, or erect except for the thoughtful and considerate bend of the head and shoulders, not a slouch but an invitation to us to think of him as a friend — it made me think of a ship’s captain or an iren guiding his troops. His mild eyes fixed me like pins.