Читать книгу Of Silence and Song - Dan Beachy-Quick - Страница 28

18.

Socrates on the day he is to die running his hand through Phaedo’s golden hair.

How to imagine it so fully as to feel it. The boy’s hair in my hand; or, the man’s hand worrying though my hair. What do I want to feel.

He’s talking about the immortality of the soul.

He says that all his life he’s had a repeating dream. In it a voice speaks and tells him to make music. Thinking philosophy the best of all music, he spoke to men and listened to their answers, making of ignorance found a truer melody, one maybe only the gods could hear.

But now, in these days leading up to his death, that oblivion now only hours away, he wonders if he has obeyed the command given to him night after night. Has he made the right music? Has he sung the song?

Maybe all the words have ended up being silence. He doesn’t know. Maybe all the words fell into the ignorance they emerged from. Maybe I guess I don’t know isn’t a song.

And so, every day in his prison cell, he has composed poems about animals for children to hear, and hearing, to learn to sing along.

One poem is about running your hand through the fur of a sleeping lion.

One poem is about a lion feeling a hand worry through its mane.

Some Scholiasts believe these two poems are one and the same. Others claim they were never written.

Phaedo, who alone might know, never told.