The Socrates Express

EPILOGUE

Arrival

5:42 p.m. On board Metrorail’s Red Line, en route from Washington, D.C.’s Union Station to Silver Spring, Maryland. Heading home.

Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. It breeds numbness. We fail to see the beauty of the proximate, or hear the music of home.

It’s tempting to blame our surroundings. I do. Metrorail isn’t Swiss nice. No views of the Alps, or much else, either. Only the sweaty back of the commuter standing too close. I’m surrounded by Schopenhauer’s porcupines, needles extended, approaching and retreating, approaching and retreating.

Yet, if my journey has taught me anything, it is that perception is a choice. The world is my idea. Why not make it a good idea?

I exit the train and walk a few blocks. I do not stroll like Rousseau or saunter like Thoreau. Mine is the hurried gait of the commuter.

I’m standing on a street corner, waiting for the Walk sign. I can’t endure twenty seconds without external stimuli, so I reach for my smartphone. I fumble (I wasn’t paying attention) and it slips from my hands, landing on the pavement hard, screen first. This can’t be good.

Sure enough, the screen has shattered. A spiderweb of fissures radiates from ground zero in the upper left corner. Shards of glass protrude. I attempt to text my wife but quit after a few letters, bleeding profusely.

There are people who handle life’s minor setbacks with aplomb. As you’ve probably surmised by now, I am not one of these people. The shattered screen is a sign, I conclude, and not a propitious one. There was, I calculate, only a one-in-two chance of my phone landing screen-down, and yet it did. Case closed. The universe is out to get me. Like a locomotive, the shattered phone pulls along boxcars of melancholia and angst. The broken phone signifies a broken life. It is Schopenhauer’s Will at work, devouring everything in its path, including me. Where is my “portion of the infinite,” as Thoreau called it?

I spend the next several minutes pouting and cursing and googling “shattered screen” on my shattered phone. I must have lost a pint of blood.

Then I surprise myself. I pause. Not a Socratic Mighty Pause—more of a mini-pause—but a start. The pause invites questions, and wonder. I wonder why, having spent the past few years imbibing the life-enhancing poetry of fourteen of history’s greatest thinkers, it hasn’t occurred to me to consult them. If philosophy can’t help me navigate this mini-crisis, what good is it?

I hear voices. Comforting voices. Chiding voices. Wise voices. Socrates urges me to stop and question my assumptions. I assume my smartphone is necessary for my happiness, my eudaimonia, but is it? Like so many, I strive to achieve ever-greater connectivity at ever greater speeds, but rarely stop to question the assumption that connectivity and speed are inherently good. I don’t know this to be true, Socrates reminds me. Is the demise of my smartphone catastrophic? Maybe, maybe not.

Epicurus spits at my so-called crisis. My phone was neither a natural nor necessary pleasure. Good riddance. Sei Shōnagon reminds me that the phone, like the cherry blossom, is impermanent. Accept that fact. Celebrate it. The Stoics, naturally, dispense no pity. Had I practiced premeditated adversity, I would have seen this coming. I can’t control the events that led to my broken phone, but I can control my reaction. I can assent to my “pre-emotion” or not. I can sulk or not. It is my choice. Man up!

So many voices. They threaten to overwhelm my own. I retreat to a coffee shop: nothing special, but good enough. Squirrelling a few of Thoreau’s “fugitive moments,” as he called these stray bits of time, I let my eyes linger on the shattered screen. I don’t look more closely, not exactly. I look differently. First from this angle, then that. I am not so much looking at my broken phone as conversing with it. Seeing is a dialogue—usually a humdrum one, but occasionally the discourse takes on a poetic quality. For someone like Thoreau, fluent in the language of the eye, life was one continuous poem.

After a few minutes, I see—and I know this sounds weird—art. Not MOMA art, but art nonetheless. The way the shards form shapes and patterns: triangles and rectangles and rhomboids, too. The way, seen as a whole, the screen resembles a stained-glass window I once saw in a Florentine church. Collateral beauty, right before my eyes.

I tuck my phone—my beautiful, broken phone—into my pocket and walk home, grateful for the visual verse I had just experienced. Mine is not a full poem. A stanza, perhaps, but I’ll take it. My portion of the infinite, at last.

What had changed? Not my phone. It is still shattered. Not the laws of nature. They are immutable. My conversation with myself had changed. I thought otherwise, so I saw otherwise. It was the slightest shift in perspective; tiny, really, but as Sei Shōnagon reminds me, there is great power, and beauty, in the small.

As I walk, one last voice rises above the rest. It is not speaking to me. It is shouting! Nietzsche. He reminds me I will walk this selfsame street again and again. I will fumble my phone and it will fall—facedown every time. Forever. I will bleed and I will fret, again, and for all eternity. Can you live with that? he asks. Can you love that?

As I walk, my answer materializes. Two short words: foreign yet familiar, absurd yet plausible, more real than real. Da capo.

Again, again.