Critique of Reason

  Critique of Reason 

Roz was out front, watering some plants she’d recently put in, “because it’s going to get hot, and it’s not going to rain.” Then, I could hear her talking to someone over the stone retaining wall, standing below her on the sidewalk, maybe Hill, our next door neighbor — I couldn’t see. But then I thought I heard her ask, “Are you a geologist?” So it wasn’t Hill.
     “Who was that?” I asked when she came in.
     “I don’t know. He was looking at our wall.”
     “But not a geologist.”
     “No. A mason, actually.”
     “What did he think of the wall?”
     “It’s good,” she said. “He says it’s good. We don’t need to do anything about it.” She sounded disappointed; she likes to worry about the wall. “He was nice,” she said, “though he was also lost — on the wrong street!
     “It was all I could do not to turn the hose on him.”

Then, as she was going back out to go to work, she asked me to begin picking up my books. “Just begin,” she said. “Don’t make a big production of it,” because I have books everywhere. I get them from the library or I buy them from online or I get them down from one of sixteen shelves of books in every room, books I've read, some three and four times, and books I haven’t read once, even the first page of. I get them out for one reason or another, to see if I can find something I am pretty sure is in there or, mostly, because I haven’t read them and it suddenly occurs to me ought to. Then, when I turn to the first page, I begin to remember why I didn’t.
     On the coffee table in the den were Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason in a massive orange (orange! like a college football jersey) paperback and on top of it a collection of Socrates’ gassing about this and that, including how it is beyond doubt, we must concede! that our souls pre-existed our bodies. Otherwise, how could we know anything at all? The Socrates stories are in  a series from the Classics Club, hardbacks the color of wet straw with the titles on the bindings in red and gold of which I have also the volume, Aristotle, On Man in the Universe but none of the others.
     I’ve read the first half of Sloterdijk twice; but there, halfway through, I get stuck. We are reading The Symposium in my book group, so I had been reading the other of Plato’s stories in the book, leading up to it, The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. And I was stuck halfway through that.

I separated the two books, laid them side by side on the dark table, steaming like clods of horse manure in the road, I thought.
     Because philosophers must steam, mustn’t they? because they can’t shut up because, if they did, how could anyone else know they are the smartest kid in class? That includes the teacher: Why does he keep trying to prove he’s the smartest kid: he’s not a kid for one thing, but he’s not the smartest for another. Meanwhile, the second smartest kid is wishing both would shut up and he could get a word. It would be one that would absolutely stump them, if he could think of it. The trouble is he can’t, and he is burning because he knows he will later when he’s walking home, or he will at his desk when he’s looking over his notes studying for finals.

So it wasn't the manure but the steaming that I was getting at. Don't, please, see it the other way around.
     Outside, the sun was hardening in the sky, and hardening the sky itself to better trap the heat below. Roz was right: it was going to be warm, even warmer than the thermometer would say.

06.03.22