Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  “Is that right?”

  “I’m afraid it is. We’re a divided community, sometimes quite fiercely.”

  We talked until just before dawn and then I slept a little, huddled into my corner of the seat. The bus stopped often, and most of the passengers got off at little towns before the Turkish frontier. When we arrived at the border, a full twelve hours later, Cole and I were almost alone on the bus.

  Cole was travelling on to Istanbul, but I planned to head south along the coastline. He had a bit of time, though, and walked with me to the next bus. It was kind of fun striding through the streets with this towering giant. I was in a country once more where the shopkeepers were quite persistent, always trying to bully tourists into their stores. They didn’t bother us, however. The hawkers shrank into their doorways, faces pale and alarmed. At my next bus I said goodbye to Cole, shook his massive hand, and wished him well on his return to Nigeria.

  Besides the Indo-European family of languages, there are at least a couple of dozen other groupings. Most of the languages in Nigeria, for instance, are part of a family called Niger-Kordofanian. The Sino-Tibetan languages, which include Mandarin and all other Chinese dialects, boast about a billion speakers.

  Most of the language families, though, are much smaller, such as Uralic, which includes a pocket of languages — Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian — that are European but not Indo-European. There are oddities such as Khoison, which features the clicking languages — the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert’s Bushmen, for example — but the real peculiarities of the linguistic world are the isolate languages. There are only a few of them, perhaps a hundred or so, and they exist completely by themselves. As far as anyone can tell, these isolate languages aren’t related to any other languages on the planet.

  Of course, all this categorization of languages is a bit academic. The fact is that one can make a very good case, and some philosophers have, that languages don’t really exist at all. A language, quipped the linguist Max Weinreich, is only a dialect with an army and a navy. And he was correct. Languages shade into one another subtly. There are rainbows of dialects, and when one rises to take precedence, when one is called a language and the rest are termed dialects, well, that’s often a political distinction more than a linguistic classification.

  On a nameless hill, on a long anonymous plain, stands the broken city of Troy. There’s not much to see, just a few leaning rock walls and a couple of archaeological trenches, but this literally, figuratively, and chronologically is the beginning of the Western world.

  I had always wanted to visit Troy. So, with a dog-eared copy of Homer in my backpack, I slipped across the Dardanelles into what is now Turkish territory. The sea today is far away, the land having silted up over the millennia. Gazing across a long plain of grass with an old broken wall slightly angled, just as the mighty walls of Troy had been described in The Iliad, I knew that from these battlements a war had indeed been waged circa twelfth century B.C.

  Travelling home from this war was Odysseus. I’ve always considered his exploits, as recounted in Homer’s other great epic, The Odyssey, to be the first real travel writing. In Latin he is Ulysses because, of course, the Romans later appropriated everything that was great about Greece. Even the name Homer is actually a Latin derivative. The name in Greek is Omeris.

  Here, in the ancient tongue of the Greeks, is a whopping good story of love and misfortune, of adventure and endless travel. “Sing to me,” Homer began, “of the man … the wanderer. Under the wide ways of earth, caught in the teeth of the gods.” The translation I have is by Robert Fitzgerald, my favourite, because it rings and strides like William Shakespeare. Read aloud around a flickering campfire, it booms and thunders like a war drum. “Of mortal creatures, all who breathe and crawl … the earth bears none frailer than man.”

  I love that stuff. It’s still some of the finest writing I’ve ever come across, except that in reality Homer never wrote it at all. He was illiterate, if indeed there was a man named Homer at all. The fact is that whoever came up with these tales couldn’t actually read a thing. The Iliad and The Odyssey are oral texts — remembered stories with all the colour and tangle of the spoken word.

  This then is the borderline between oral and written cultures. We’ve been speaking languages for perhaps a hundred thousand years, but the writing down of them is relatively recent. Starting about five thousand years ago, we made lists of things, and around the time of Homer (sometime in the ninth century B.C.) written words began recounting the great stories.

  It’s important to remember that languages, in essence, are merely arbitrary sounds to which we’ve attached meanings. With writing we took everything a step farther. We assigned random marks to these arbitrary sounds. But it all made sense. It was a way of encoding the world. It was a meaning system we had been working on for a very long time.

  Scholars are divided about how Homer’s words found their way into print, how they at last became a written reality. Some say Homer, or someone else, dictated The Iliad and The Odyssey to a scribe. Others speculate that the stories were passed down orally with a few changes here and there for many more generations until they finally settled into their accepted texts. By the sixth century B.C., it’s certain The Iliad and The Odyssey had become the central books of ancient Greece — and by extension of our modern world.

  Homer’s telling of the tales probably took place over many nights and numerous cups of wine. The storyteller might have accompanied himself on a stringed instrument, tweaking at the hearts of listeners with a swell of chord and melody. But what’s really important here is that somehow, somewhere, someone began to write it all down. The earliest Greek texts had lines that wove down the page. The first line was read left to right, as you’re reading this, but then the line after that would be read right to left, as in Arabic or Hebrew, so that the eye literally zigzagged down the page. And though this at first seems absurd, at least one modern theorist has wondered why this manner of reading and printing never caught on. It really does seem to make much more sense.

  At any rate, none of that really matters. What’s important is that someone wrote the stories down. Writing crystallizes language. It catches it, holding it like an insect in a fossilized drop of amber.

  And now here I was, almost three thousand years later, taking in something Homer himself had never actually seen. I wondered how a blind man could have been so precise with his descriptions. Scratching my own poor stories onto paper, I’m still humbled and inspired by his eloquence.

  For the next four weeks I followed Homer’s sweet trail of words back into Greece. I plunged into his wine-dark seas. I slept on the deck of a half-dozen rusting and anonymous ferries, chugging southward from island to island across the placid Aegean Sea, and whenever I could I read a line in The Odyssey and came upon the very real place being described.

  On Crete I hiked up to the ancient ruins of Knossos. Odysseus brushed past here on his way to the Land of the Lotus Eaters. Knossos is a Minoan palace a thousand years older than classical Greek civilization. It has been largely reconstructed by a French archaeological team, and walking around its ruins, I could feel how impressive it must have once been.

  Here one of the very earliest writing systems was unearthed. The Linear B script was discovered on a number of broken clay tablets, but it wasn’t until 1953 that it was finally deciphered. The script is a form of archaic Greek dialect and is based mostly on syllabic signs, a fair number of logograms (where a single symbol represents a whole word), and a base ten number system, the forerunner of our own mathematics. Most of the tablets are simply lists, a kind of accounting of tools, animals, and materials, but they provided the basis for the written language to come. The letters would soon relax and blossom into the call of Sirens and Cyclops, and over time would record the tale of Odysseus, shining among the deathless gods, sailing to his one true love on the distant shores of Ithaca.

  The south coast of Crete faces Africa. A dusty bus ride gets you there
— eventually. Over the backbone of the island I bounced along, heading for a little seaside village named Matala.

  In the 1960s, Matala was on the hippie trail. Jimi Hendrix came through here. Cat Stevens stopped by on his way to India. Joni Mitchell lived in one of the caves in the cliffs. Nowadays police sweep through the caves in the evening and eject anybody trying to recapture their youth. The caves are ancient Minoan tombs and stare down over a bright beach, flooded during the day with travellers. I met no one here except for a bedraggled, eccentric old woman. She was from Germany originally, she said, but had lived in Greece for years. The woman cackled, hacked, and told me about the bonfires that used to roar on the beach decades ago. She spoke about the young men with their guitars, about their long hair and their dreams, and the crashing surf that comes in from Africa.

  So one dark night, under the starry dome, I went down to sit on the beach. Far off in front of me were the coasts of Egypt and Tunisia. This was the end of the known world for ancient Greek wayfarers. Beyond this was only the strange, the curious mention of elephants, and spices.

  I sat on the cool sand and thought about the Rosetta stone, which was used to first decode ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. They hadn’t been read for a couple of thousand years, but when the Rosetta stone was unearthed by a troop of Napoleon’s soldiers in the dunes along the Nile River, it was immediately recognized as the needed missing linguistic link.

  The Rosetta stone is just a big flat rock with inscriptions describing the coronation of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The uppermost lines are unreadable hieroglyphics. The middle lines are demotic (a cursive form of glyphs and a forerunner to Arabic), and the bottom lines are Greek. There were plenty of scholars who could translate the ancient Greek, and since the hieroglyphics carried exactly the same message, well … for the first time in two thousand years the Egyptian pictographs unfolded and all the long stretch of history was revealed.

  The above, though, isn’t what I intended to write about. I meant to fashion the old German woman into a modern-day Oracle. I meant to dig up some more on Jimi Hendrix. I meant to go drinking in the Mermaid Tavern, but somehow my thoughts on that beach diverted me and I found myself wading through a deeper history.

  Napoleon lost the stone to the British, and they carried it off to London to the confines of the British Museum. I touched it once, this magical Rosetta stone, a gesture very much like blasphemy to a museum curator. Strange, actually, because moments later an urgent siren wailed, and a legion of uniformed guards swept into the large room out of nowhere.

  They didn’t head directly for me, though surely the colour of my face had blanched into a pale and guilty white. No, they herded everyone into a group and pushed us out an unmarked door. One minute I was brushing my hand against the Rosseta stone and the next I was standing in a parking lot. What really happened is that someone had phoned in a bomb scare. Obviously, the guards were used to such eventualities and were highly trained. Rightly so, because in a place like the British Museum, a repository of the world’s greatest treasures, the damage an explosion would cause would be a blow against all of humanity.

  In any event, through Greek we know the ancients. Those who could write Greek began to record everything. Much of the Bible has come to us through Greek. So have our first solid glimpses of science, medicine, and philosophy. From Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom, we have the first intimations of what we would become.

  From Crete I sailed to the Cycladic Islands. Dolphins danced in the ship’s wake, and in a few hours’ time we were under the cliffs of Santorini, the first of the islands. Everyone aboard moved outside to stand at the railings and gawk. Santorini is spectacular. The cliffs rise five hundred metres straight out of the water, and at their very top, miraculously clinging to the rocks, is the whitewashed town of Thera.

  The ferry pulled into a little port at the base of the cliffs. We poured onto a bus that then laboured up a switchbacking road. Up and up we went in the swaying bus, stopping sometimes to reverse when a truck rumbled down the other way, loaded with tomatoes or watermelons.

  At the rim of the cliff the terraces of the town overlook the frothing ocean far below. The houses are painted in traditional Greek colours — white with blue windowsills and doorstops. From here I could see that the cliffs swept around in a crescent moon shape, forming the one remaining wall of a vast volcanic cauldron. Down below there were smaller islands of black lava, some still steaming with the fury of the Earth’s core.

  On the other end of Santorini, in the opposite crook of the crescent, is Oia, another tiny village. The tourists come here to watch the sunset. Busload upon busload arrives as the sun starts to dip. They line the cliffs and watch the sun boil red and dip at last into the sea. On the day I was there perhaps a thousand people actually broke into applause at the sunset. That was something I had never experienced before. They were clapping as if they had just seen a theatrical performance, and an old man beside me turned my way and smiled wryly. He was from somewhere in England.

  “By George,” he said, “that’s the second most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen.”

  He appeared to be well into his seventies, so I imagined he had watched plenty of sunsets. I wondered, in fact, if he had seen Chantal’s fine sunset in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Of course, I couldn’t help but ask, “So where is the most beautiful sunset in the world?”

  “Oh … I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet. You see, I just like to leave room for improvement.”

  The language Homer spoke was only one of a multitude of Greek dialects used in the ninth century B.C. The Greek that’s spoken today comes down to us from only a single one of these many dialects, something we owe largely to Alexander the Great. He was a pupil, we’re often reminded, of Aristotle, who also came from the northern reaches of Greece. But Alexander, thundering across the far plains of Asia, conquering most of the known world, decided there would be only one language for communication in his vast empire. And for this he chose the dialect of Athens.

  Attic Greek, as it’s called, wasn’t Alexander’s mother tongue, so his decision was brave and enlightened. He was wise enough to see that in Athens something spectacular was happening. A new world was being forged, and Attic was its language.

  Alexander’s decision is a monumental turning point in history, one that’s had a vast effect on humanity. It’s much like the spread of English throughout the world today. English, of course, travelled across the globe under the fist of the British Empire, the one the sun never set on. And in the dissolution of that empire a detritus of English was left in pockets around the planet.

  Twenty-five hundred years ago the same was true of Attic Greek. Throughout Europe and the Middle East it became the language of commerce, politics, and religion. Our first democracy and much of the kick-start of Greek philosophy rode on the tails of this one little dialect.

  Alexander called this notion of a standard tongue a koine, meaning “to imprint,” in this case a common language stamped upon the various peoples of his empire (from which we get not only the word but the concept of “coining a phrase”). Today Attic roots, largely through the Latin and then the French side of our linguistic ancestry, account for about 30 percent of all English words. And what words they are: tragedy and triumph, poetry and parable, history and tyranny. We have narcotic, embryo, and skeleton. We have arithmetic and paradox. All of these are direct cognates from Attic Greek. Even the name Europe comes from the old Greek tongue. School and music and theatre and symphony and theory and Catholic and character and astronaut — all from the vast encyclopedia that is Greek.

  That evening I caught a ferry that would finally take me to Athens. I slept on the deck once more, and in the grey-eyed dawn came to the port of Piraeus. Athens itself is a few kilometres inland. The ferry dumped us off at the dockyards, and I hoisted my backpack once more and ventured up toward the buses.

  When I finally arrived in Athens, I was sorely disappointed. I’d taken a huge roundabout, a circling
of the entire Aegean Sea, to get here, and what I found was a vast sprawl of ugly concrete apartment blocks. Ten million people live in Athens under a perpetual cloud of exhaust fumes. It’s not a pretty city, and there’s an almost constant barrage of traffic noise.

  What was it about this place? Why had I come here?

  Way back in graduate school I studied a rather obscure little field in linguistics. I immersed myself in language consciousness. I looked at what it meant to think in one language as opposed to thinking in another. The field was obscure — mostly because everyone else had given up on it. Language consciousness wasn’t politically correct anymore. Anything that could be said or thought in one language could, most surely, be said or thought in another. Wasn’t that true?

  Yes, but I still can’t stop thinking that there’s something more to languages, something about them that deeply defines us. I thought about Chantal and Valérie. They had talked about “living” in a language. It was the House of Being thing again, a palace filled with treasures.

  I had come to Greece to see the birthplace of the Western world, the place where a whole new way of thinking, a whole new world view, was invented. Gazing around Athens, it was hard to imagine that anything special ever happened here. But it did. One rocky promontory still pushes above the clammer and clatter. It’s sadly awash with tourists, of course, here to snap photos and cross one more destination off their lists. And it’s too bad, because this really is the heart of everything. This is the Acropolis, the stony outcropping that’s been inhabited in one way or another for five thousand years. It is a sacred place, an island on the vast Attic plain. Most important, it is the earthly seat of Athena, the goddess of wisdom.