It seems, without my knowing it, I’ve earned the privilege to have a brick engraved with whatever I like at the top of the walkway under the blind Academy arches. Mine will not bear my name, but it will say in Latin (of course!):
Noli sequi
in vestigiis
sapientium.
Quaere novas
vias ad
veritatem.
‘Don’t follow In the footsteps of the wise. Seek new paths to truth.’ This is what I’ve always tried to do. I half suspect the truth is a mirage, but I feel drawn to it, believing that though it is an illusion, it nevertheless gives life its meaning and value and allows us to become truly ourselves. As Melville says in Moby Dick, such a phantom is the key to it all:
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting,
mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves
see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Was Ahab an absurd, tragic figure? Surely by the conventions of this world he was, but every half-step that towering, one-legged old man took was taken on a path that was heroically his own. He sought meaning in a meaningless universe, what Melville called the Whiteness of the Whale, and went prodigiously mad. It was a fool’s errand, but Ahab was a grand fool and achieved the full, senseless glory of what it is to be human.
I am no such staggering figure. There is no white whale that haunts my dreams, unless it be that I would speak a few poetic words or lines that would make this meaningless, soundless universe betray itself in song. Call it the Music of the Spheres . . . human voices flickering alive and then dying out into deepest night as if there had never been any sound at all, no word, not in the beginning or end, such markers being themselves but illusions. Nothing ever begins or ends except that which is always beginning and always ending.
Would you join that chorus of dying voices? To take your place there you must follow your own path, passionately seeking a phantom that is no more than a reflection of yourself and mocks you at every turn along the way.
Call it a lie and a fool’s errand. Yet, it is a truth worth living and dying for, even though that dying be in my particular case but slumber, a comedy unworthy of an Ahab or a Quixote.