Eye of Flame by Pamela Sargent Read Free Book Online

shot her one last glance before he fled the room; she had been surprised to see no anger, only despair.
    She had made her choice and betrayed him. Tad had disappeared from school after that amid rumors he was ill; she had not even called his parents to find out how he was, and found out only later that his parents had sent him to another school elsewhere.
     
    The sand shifted under her feet. She turned as Tad came up to her side. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.
    “How heartless I was before.”
    He adjusted the collar of his jacket. “I thought I was in love with you back in high school. I think I had a crush on all of you in a way, but you were the only one who would talk to me. I kept hoping, I thought I’d never get over—” He paused. “Well, that’s past. I doubt the others even remember.”
    She looked up at his handsome, even-featured face. At close range, his features were almost too perfect, as if he were hardly human at all. “You’ve changed a lot, Tad. You’ve probably had plenty of opportunities to forget us.”
    He shook his head. “I couldn’t forget you. You were the first girl I loved. You don’t forget that.”
    She sat down on a sandy slope; he seated himself next to her. “I was a fraud then,” she said. “It was all a pose. I was so afraid of—”
    “I can understand that.”
    “I’m still a fraud. I do my work, and I suppose I do it well enough, but it isn’t really my life in the way it should be. I’m supposedly a Plato scholar. Plato valued the life of the mind above all, but I don’t know if I do or not.” She laughed softly. “How naive that sounds. I used to think that once you assented to an argument’s validity, you’d have to change your views, even your life if necessary. One of my professors found that notion quite amusing. He said I had it the wrong way around, that philosophers find arguments to justify only what they already believe.”
    Tad was gazing at her steadily; she was surprised to see warmth and sympathy in his eyes. “I’m supposed to be writing a monograph on Plato’s Philebus ,” she continued.
    “I studied some philo in college,” Tad said. “Mostly courses in symbolic logic, but I did read some Plato.”
    “It’s the dialogue where Plato deals with the relation of pleasure to the good and tries to show the comparative worthlessness of physical pleasures. He shows the contradictions involved in asserting that pleasure alone is the good, but he can’t conclusively disprove that purely hedonistic belief. All he can really do is to show that the life of the mind, the intellect, is a truer pleasure than those most people seek.” She sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come out here. It’s just made the contradictions in my own life more evident. If I really believed in the choices I made, I wouldn’t still envy my friends.”
    “I’m afraid my intellectual pleasures were the only ones I had,” Tad said. “Math interested me the most. It seemed to take me to that realm of forms Plato wrote about, where objective truth could be found. I could forget the world then, see it as an illusion, as only the dimmest reflection of the real realm of truth and beauty, as only shadows on the wall of a cave in which people are trapped. Mathematics was far more real to me than the physical world.”
    That, she thought, was a Platonic enough notion. Tad went on speaking of how much each thing in the world also existed as a mathematical possibility; the world would change and eventually die, but the possibilities mathematical sets expressed would always exist, were in fact eternal. But he also seemed to think that the barrier between the physical world and this mathematical one could be breached, that a way of breaching it could be expressed mathematically, that the manipulation of certain symbols by itself could transform physical facts. As he spoke, she lost the thread of his argument, unable to tell if he was talking about applied