Nostos : Fri Aug 2 2024

Moses, Plato, Locke, Alastair

Dear Friends,

“I’m so lost, Joey, just lost without him.” Thus Mrs. L. A., widowed in June and without a marriage sunrise in July. She’s in the street and I’m on the sidewalk on the edge of Auditorium Park last Wednesday and we hug and before we finish she continues: “We met at 14 and were married at 19 and now I’m lost.” She looks away out across the Park through the kids and past the families towards Day’s but nowhere.

Like he went to get her an ice cream cone and will come back across Pitman Avenue any moment. As you yourself have probably done for your wife many times.

You’ll remember from a previous letter to you that she had rented a condo with an ocean view on Ocean Pathway for the entire month of July for $25,000 for the sole purpose of giving her then long-ailing and now recently-deceased husband one last summer at the beach in Ocean Grove.

If I’m going to be lost, may it be in Ocean Grove, her eyes say, and she turns, and she gives me another hug, this one weary.

On Sunday, July 21 at 1pm we celebrated the life of professor D. G.’s wife. The Auditorium choir took up an entire third of the Tabernacle and in that ancient wooden temple with the surprisingly cool south wind and 100 trained human voices singing as if it were their last concert, regardless of whether or not you believed in heaven, you would have felt like you were there.

I held my wife close and didn’t even try to hide my wet eyes, always facing the noble widowed professor.

It only rained once in Ocean Grove in July, and it rained on all of us. In the drops we are yet again the same thing: waterproof, rain-soaked Homo sapiens, seeking refuge. (While the tiny ones seek the rivers on Broadway!)

We were also the same thing on July 13 when a young male human being tried to assassinate an older male human being who once held the office of President of the United States, this in Butler, Pennsylvania, not Ocean Grove, New Jersey. Now, there’s no law written on the hearts of humankind compelling everyone to like everyone else — in the Grove or in the nation.

But how did you teach your children that no matter whether you like or dislike someone it is never right to harm him or her, let alone take one’s life?

Moses

You shall not murder. (Exodus 20:13)

Socrates

Socrates: “Then it’s not the work of the just person to do harm, Polemarchus, either to a friend or to anyone else, but of his opposite, the unjust person.”

Polemarchus: “You seem to me to be speaking the truth absolutely, Socrates.” (Plato, Republic Book 1: 335E)

Locke

The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions … And being furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed an such Subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s Uses. (Second Treatise of Government II.4, distinctive punctuation, capitalization, and italics are original)

Americans

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life … (Declaration of Independence)

On July 27 our family and friends celebrated the 19th birthday of our first son, Alastair, who was born and died on the same day in 2005. There are two Greek words in acrostic on his tombstone in Blacklick, Ohio: φῶς, ζωή (light, life). I dug the hole that forever holds my firstborn son.

In the rain in July we are all the same human thing. Alastair, too, and the professor’s wife and Mrs. L. A.’s husband. Like or dislike, we’re all the same, and as humans we’re on the same team.

In the US in July we are all the same citizen thing. Jefferson, too, and the former president and the now-dead almost-assassin. Like or dislike, we’re all the same, and as citizens we’re on the same team.

When the noise of the news is overwhelming you and the Sirens of disunity are bewitching you, Odyssey is here.

To that end we work.

~ Joey