Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Read Free Book Online Page A

which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be—an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures. ...The sun is new each day.” The earth is fire. Heraclitus, sagest of all.
    Other girls might pick up and drop the boys across the street at Columbia. Our way of being fickle was switching allegiance from Plato to Aristotle. For two weeks we thought Plato the last word, and prematurely believed the adage quoted by our winning Professor Boles, disheveled and abstracted as a philosophy teacher should be: that all the rest of philosophy was merely a footnote. Till Aristotle, who came dragging the reputation of a plodder. He even looked dull: the pages in his text were thinner, the lines of type closer together. But Eureka! The whole material world Plato had left behind returned incarnate, every seed, every egg with an earthly destiny to fulfill. Other girls might aspire to diamond rings or posts in student government; our mission was to locate Truth on whatever library shelf it might be found. And to see, as some hope to see God, entelechy: essence unfurling itself in the passage from potential to actual reality.
    We slipped into middle age and a turnabout occurred. We have seen so many ideas come and go; they appear on the horizon as fleetingly as rainbows, they rise and fall and rise again like hemlines. They are our cast-off familiars, we keep them in the attic with our inappropriate dresses, too sentimentally valued to throw away, worn now and then in a frivolous mood. There is a place for Heraclitus and the notion of genesis in fiery strife, a place for patient Aristotle and even for the weightless Bishop Berkeley, a place for the existentialists and the masters of Zen. They coexist in tranquillity as they would in an afterlife; they drift in space as insubstantial ghosts do, and parlay their differences without rancor.
    We still try to understand and look for truth. But without the same urgency. Paradoxically, our quest has become academic though we are long out of the academy. Urgency now is reserved for ourselves. In the midst of life, our children, husbands, work, money, aging parents, and shall we take lovers are the daily ontological quandaries. What a falling-off, from that grand fire of Heraclitus that sparked the universe, to our small fires within. And yet to demean the personal is a form of sophistry (Professor Boles was harsh on sophistry), as well as a form of self-deprecation, feminists say. In any event, what we discuss with fervor today is our lives, their inner workings. This is a tedious sort of fascination, a fascinating sort of tedium. A casuist’s labor. When we have thoroughly dissected our aberrations from some Platonic Idea of ourselves, parsed our neuroses, we move on to a more pragmatic question, just as Greek philosophy, Professor Boles tidily summed up, moved from scientific to epistemological to ethical: What do we know, How do we know it, and What are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about our own perversities? Ignore them where possible? Exorcise them? The patients of the better sort of doctors come away not so much purged as mellowed. Esther had herself analyzed.
    It did not change her noticeably but maybe she finds life and herself easier to tolerate. Shall we accept them, even love them? Surely if we can be exhorted to love our neighbors and love our enemies, we can attempt to love ourselves. Or shall we exploit them for professional advantage, like politicians and military men, high-class whores and artists?
    On the topic of friendship Aristotle says, “It is well not to seek to have as many friends as possible, but as many as are enough for the purposes of living together.” We were a family of sorts, a family of sophomores, sophomoric. We switched the roles of parents and children, depending on the need. After studying alone till eleven or eleven-thirty, we gathered in