Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  I managed to find a little pathway around the northern edge of the Acropolis. There are some old houses — painted in the traditional fashion. Bougainvillea flowers drape down the walls, and birds chirp in the foliage.

  The pathway skirts around the back of the Acropolis away from tour buses and snapping cameras. It overlooks the Agora, a large field of rocks that is, or was, the ancient marketplace of Athens. I wandered into a little museum there, mostly to find some shade. There were the inevitable statues, broken and fragmentary. Old, wise eyes stared at me from marble perches. But one small glass case caught my eye. In it a tangle of metal scraps, like a hairball, looked up at me, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  Nails, the plaque said, cobbler’s nails from the shop of Simon, the shoemaker. The nails were fused together by age, but I read further. It is known, the inscription said, that Socrates often frequented Simon’s little shop. Likely, he held among the first of his lectures here. So, I gathered, this was one of the first informal settings of the Academy of Athens. A young Plato might well have sat beside Simon, helping him to cut leather for shoes while they listened to the great teacher.

  For Socrates the great business of life was dialogue. He spoke with many of the citizens of Athens, switching, within a few sentences, from the mundane and trite observations of weather and shopping that usually pepper our talk, to a deep engagement with thought itself. In one of his first dialogues, as related by Plato, Socrates took on some of the philosophers that had come before him. He was particularly interested in the ancient Greek word arete. Now arete refers to the purpose of something, but more than that it’s the measure of how well something performs its required purpose, the measure of its excellence.

  The Pre-Socratics had spent long hours attempting to define this arete. Everything has its own measure of arete, they claimed. The arete of a chimney, for example, consists in how well it draws smoke up and out of a room and how well it reflects heat back into a room. Odysseus displayed his arete in his unquenchable thirst to return home, to battle even the gods in his desire to make it back to Ithaca.

  But Socrates came to a different conclusion. Just as the purpose of a chimney is to draw smoke up and out of a room, the purpose of a human being is to seek knowledge. Through reason, Socrates said, an individual can free himself from the dark cave of the unknown. Through reason we can unravel the mysteries of the world and venture beyond oracles, gods, and fate.

  And that surely smacks of a world view.

  Now, of course, it would be foolish to imagine that the whole Western world grew from this single word arete. I only point out that sometimes a single word can contain vast, sprawling ideas. New ideas. And it’s not that these words are untranslatable. It’s not that no one else can understand them. It’s just that they emerged here first, that they were believed here first ... in this language.

  I glanced up from the little pile of nails. Had they heard the voice of Socrates? Had these small nails rolled about on the floor while his ideas came into being? Outside, the sun beat relentlessly on the stones. The Acropolis towered blackly above me, and I knew I was onto something. I didn’t completely understand it, but I knew then that languages can contain whole worlds. And I wanted to go and see them.

  After a few days in Athens, I caught the train for Patras, a port city on the west coast of Greece. From there I would go to Italy. The train moved across the backbone of Greece, out over the Corinth Canal, across the top of the Peloponnese.

  It was evening when I left Patras. The ferry to Italy chugged along so slowly that we didn’t seem to move at all. We inched into the Adriatic Sea. The wide island of Cephalonia eventually reared up, and just north of that was a smaller island, green and double-humped. Something about it kept me on deck. The sun was growing larger and pinker in its descent, and the sea was truly wine-dark for an instant. Then I realized which island I was looking at. This was Ithaca, home of Odysseus. The trip from Troy had taken him ten long years, but in the telling of that journey a whole new world was created.

  A single star emerged in the moonless night. I stood for a few moments longer on deck, then ducked back in through a hatchway. I needed rest, so I curled up in a corner and fell asleep to the soft murmur of the sea.

  3

  And Empires, Too,

  Shall Splash Across These Pages

  The ferry pulled into Brindisi on the heel of the boot of Italy, and I stepped off, having had enough of sea travel for a while. Stars still hung in the east, but the harbour was already alive with touts and merchants. Brindisi is better known among travellers as “Brain Disease.” Sorry, but it’s true. There’s a mind-numbingly long wait there between the time ferries pull in and when trains leave to take you up the coast. And there’s nothing to do but sit around the featureless docks trying to safeguard your valuables from hordes of vendors and pickpockets.

  When I finally did get on a train, however, it was headed for Rome, the Eternal City. All around me in the cramped compartment people spoke Italian. It’s a beautiful Romance language that dances on the tongue. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a language for sweeping women off their feet, though it can. Calling it a Romance language means that it’s a remnant of ancient Rome. It’s one of the children of Latin, the tongue of the Roman Empire.

  I found myself a little pension not far from the Spanish Steps in Rome. In a square near there I saw a Japanese couple swarmed by Gypsy children. None of the children were older than ten, and the youngest might have been six. They surrounded the couple, a mob of them, tearing at their pockets, at her purse and his camera. An old lady, dressed entirely in black, had been sitting at the fountain, and at this commotion she suddenly stood and began to blow on a whistle. Then, all along the street, shopkeepers came running out of their stores. It must have been a sort of vigilante system they had set up for the neighbourhood. The Gypsy kids bolted, leaving the poor Japanese tourists confused.

  Afterward I sat with the old woman, who I thought was very brave. She spoke a bit of English and told me a story I’ll never forget.

  “You go to Colosseum?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course. I’ll see it this afternoon.”

  “You see the cats, yes?”

  I had heard of them. The ancient Colosseum of Rome, an immense building that still towers almost jarringly over the centre of the city, crawls with cats.

  The old woman pointed at her chest. “I go to feed the cats.”

  “You feed them?”

  “Sì.” She heaved herself up and sighed. “In the war Mussolini ... you know?” She made a face.

  I chuckled. “Yes, Mussolini.”

  “A very bad time. No food.” She looked me hard in the eye. “No food, so we eat ... anything. You understand?”

  I saw where she was going. During the worst of the war, the people ate wild cats. There was no choice.

  “I was little girl,” she said, “but I remember. I cried. And then we, all people of Rome, we made a ... what you call it ... a promise to the cats. We said, you helped us and we never forget, so we give the Colosseum to them. You understand? Forever, we go there and give them food.”

  “That’s only fair.”

  “Yes, only fair.”

  Later I did go to the Colosseum. It’s impressive, though the area below it, the famous Roman Forum, seat of one of the greatest empires that ever existed, is a rather sad two blocks of dirt and rubble. Only with the expert knowledge of a guide can one understand what was once there, since there’s really not a lot to see. Somewhere in these ruins Julius Caesar was murdered. Somewhere here Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Somewhere here the last of the Roman emperors huddled in the dark with the barbarians at the gates.

  On a fallen pediment, however, I saw a bit of chiselled writing, something I could read. The letters were familiar, all capitals perhaps, but the script was as plain as the text in front of you now. I was reading a word that was almost two thousand years old. And then, as if to break the spell, a skinny little kitten s
kittered onto the marble slab. It pawed the air where a bright blue butterfly fluttered by, and I had to smile. The empire had come to this, as all empires are destined to do. Then the kitten flicked a paw at the air and hopped into the shadows between the fallen stones.

  I found once in an old book a fragment of a poem from Sappho:

  That’s Greek, of course, but look at the passage when it’s put into Latin:

  DEDUKE MEN A SELANNA

  KAI PLEIADES. MESAI DE

  NUKTES. PATA D’ERKHET’ ORA.

  EGO DE MONA KATEUDO

  If you heard the above spoken aloud in either language, you would never know they were related. The written text, though, especially in uppercase letters, shows an astonishing resemblance. Quite obviously the written Latin borrowed heavily from the Greek.

  It’s a pattern. Some languages muscle their way across continents. They travel first on the feet of soldiers, pillaging and plundering. Then, if things go well, they float on the light winds of trade. After that they’re unstoppable.

  Languages can be powerful things. The stronger ones quite simply bulldoze the weaker ones, assimilating whatever is useful and discarding the rest. It doesn’t take long. Even the speakers of the weaker language, or their children, anyway, soon start conversing in the more powerful tongue. People are quick to take up any language that will give them greater access to material advancement. It’s survival of the fittest.

  Empires are as much about language as they are about conquest. Today the three largest language populations in the world — English, Spanish, and Mandarin — are that way because they’re the shells of past empires that inundated other languages, drowning them with power. Latin isn’t on that list only because it died in a dusty armchair as a happy old man. It had already given the world a host of powerful children that includes Spanish and English.

  The above fragment by Sappho, by the way, translates as:

  The Pleiads have left the sky, and

  The moon has vanished. It’s midnight

  The time for meeting is over

  And me — I am lying, lonely.

  The train to Florence passes through lovely rolling hills. Cypress trees, rising like solidified whirls of smoke, stand in long, solemn rows. This is the legendary landscape of Tuscany, heart of the Italian Renaissance.

  In Florence I’d arranged to meet with Lesley, an old friend of mine. She’s a doctor from England and speaks three languages, Italian included. Funny enough, though, this was her first real trip to Italy. She had learned Italian in school and had never been to a place where she could actually use it.

  The first thing to know about Florence is that the name is only our clumsy English approximation. Here they call it Firenze, a moniker with fire in its belly. And it’s true. Five hundred years ago Florence burned with a collection of geniuses the world will probably never see again — Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo. This city was at the heart of an explosion, the shifting of gears between the old world and the new.

  It was the Renaissance, of course, literally the rebirth, not so much of the Roman Empire but of the ideals of long-ago Greece. And it was the dialect spoken here in Florence that finally replaced ancient Latin to become the language we now know as Italian. Most of that was due to the work of Dante Alighieri, another Florentine genius.

  Never mind that Dante was exiled from Florence. It was he who went on to write The Divine Comedy, one of the great books of history, in the Florentine dialect. He made it plain for all to see that here was a dialect of great delicacy. In the rush and sweep of his almost endless imagination he let loose a language that trips from the tongue like no other.

  Walking down the ancient medieval streets, I made up a little game. Lesley and I were off to see Michelangelo’s David, and though I was as usual completely inept at the language, I so badly wanted to try it out that I started making stuff up.

  “Fettuccine?” I asked her, pointing at some luxurious old building.

  “What?”

  “Botticelli,” I continued somewhat more insistently. “Paparazzi.”

  “Don’t be such a tosser.”

  “Right … sorry.”

  Lesley, as I’ve said, really was fluent in Italian and managed to get me safely through numerous transgressions. Once, in fact, she literally opened a door for us with this most beautiful of languages. One afternoon in Florence we went to see the Medici Chapel. The tombs there were sculpted by Michelangelo. I set up my camera on a tripod, but as usual in places like this, people weren’t allowed to use flashes. So I diligently opened the f-stop for a long exposure.

  A female security guard accosted me immediately. She waved her finger in my face and made it crystal-clear that I wasn’t allowed to use a tripod. Her hands flew through the air, circling and swooping as she chewed me out. The woman was as ferocious as a pit bull, so I meekly folded my tripod and limped off to lick my wounds. Lesley and I gazed at the marbles for a while, then I reminded her of something I’d read in my guidebook. There are sketches by Michelangelo here, it said. Ask to see them.

  Well, this place wasn’t an art gallery. It was a chapel filled with tombs, and I couldn’t see anything resembling sketches. Lesley glanced around. There was no one else there except the pit bull security guard, now standing in the corner and eyeing us suspiciously.

  “Shall I ask her then?” Lesley questioned.

  “I guess so.”

  She went over and spoke Italian to the pit bull. Instantly, the guard erupted, her hands gesturing madly. Lesley translated the barrage for me. “It’s impossible,” she was saying. “You must obtain permission from the front desk in writing. It takes six months to be approved.”

  Then the woman looked at us, and her attitude melted a bit. We had been unfailingly polite to her as only the British and Canadians can be, so she recanted. Glancing both ways as if to make sure the coast was clear, she put a finger to her lips and swore us to silence. Then she motioned us to follow her down a hallway off to the side. I think now that it was Lesley’s Italian that tipped the scales. Perhaps the pit bull felt badly about verbally mauling us twice. So we followed her along the narrow passageway, and in the shadows she stopped and reached down to a latch on the floor. It was a trap door. She opened it and pointed. “Vai la giu,” she said. “Go down there.” A ladder poked up out of the opening, and Lesley and I exchanged looks.

  We climbed into something like a cellar, a whitewashed space maybe the size of a small bedroom. The woman didn’t accompany us down the ladder, and as our eyes gradually adjusted, I saw marks all over the walls. I peered more closely. Here there was a delicately rendered hand slightly turned, there a half-finished profile — a bearded god-like figure. They were drawings that were unmistakably the work of a master. The master. Here were the sketches of Michelangelo. He had stood in this little room and had left his mark on these walls.

  It’s something we all tend to do, though few of us can do it like Michelangelo. Still, we all like to mark where we’ve been. We all want to say simply, “I was here.”

  Afterward, I tried to find prints of these drawings, photos in books, postcards, anything, but I’ve never seen them reproduced anywhere. They were, it seems, done while Michelangelo was in hiding. He sheltered here during a siege of the city in 1530. The troops of Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, had surrounded Florence and were shelling it with cannons. Michelangelo stayed in this cellar for a month, doodling on the walls with charcoal. They were among the last drawings he ever did. Not long after the siege he fled to Rome and lived out the last years of his life there, never again to return to his beloved Firenze.

  The drawings were only discovered again in 1975. The little cellar is still closed to the public and all but a handful of restoration scientists and historians. But somehow we were allowed in. The doors were unlocked for us, and we were allowed a glimpse of the sublime sketches of a frail and frightened genius.

  We all make our marks in various ways. Humans are experts at creating and mani
pulating marks or symbols. Language is just one of these systems of symbols. We also use mathematics and spatial orientation. Humans can think in music or even with kinesthetic intelligence, a sort of muscle memory that might be used to choreograph a ballet or map a strategy for winning a football game. All of these are called semiotic systems, semiotics being the study of how humans represent things, how we assign symbols as stand-ins for much more complex ideas.

  Humans are very good at symbols, much better than gorillas, for example. The most famous gorilla to use symbols was named Koko, who was taught to recognize and employ more than a thousand, even becoming proficient enough to name a kitten she had acquired for a pet. Koko named it All Ball, perhaps referring to the fact that the cat was an excellent playmate. But even if you buy the supposition that Koko truly understood what she was doing, with a thousand symbols she was working at about the level of a three-year-old human child.

  The point is that humans tend to think in a variety of semiotic systems, representing things with symbols — topographical lines on a map, a percentage sign, holding up our middle finger at the guy who cuts us off in traffic — but the most powerful, most efficient, most versatile of these semiotic systems is undoubtedly language.

  For one thing languages constantly change. They always evolve to meet our needs. Anyone can see the difference between Shakespearean English and our modern version. We’ve lost thou and thee, but that’s four hundred years of change and easy to see.

  The fact is that no matter what the various protectors of grammar say, languages relentlessly mutate. They borrow words and ideas from other languages. They change their pronunciation, and over time they even lose bits and pieces of their grammar. I suspect, for instance, that the adverb suffix ly will disappear from English in another fifty years. As shocking as it might appear to English teachers, sentences like “I tried to get there quick” will become perfectly grammatical.