The Ten Thousand

BOOK TEN

In vain, man's expectations, in vain, his boastful words.

God brings the unthought to be,

As here we see.

– EURIPIDES

THE AGONY OF hatred, the ecstasy of love. Trite notions, easily separable into their distinct, almost opposite component parts, sung of by poets and wept at by lovers from time immemorial and undoubtedly for a hundred generations to come. The ecstasy of hatred, the agony of love. A no-less-common state of affairs, though comprehended by fewer numbers, perhaps only the Clearchuses among us: the impetus behind the movers of the world, the creators and killers and bestirrers of humanity. Again, they are sentiments easily divided into their identifiable and perfectly contrasting elements, like gold so assayed by fire as to congeal into pure, glistening droplets, distinguishing itself from the surrounding slag.

Pain, denial, triumph, tears, passion, revenge, betrayal, rapture. To which condition do we ascribe these emotions and motivations, to hatred, or to love? The admixture becomes more dense, more difficult to define, and the two seem to meld seamlessly into each other. Although the two perfect, unalloyed extremes may be easily distinguished, and unskilled poets and petty philosophers will make much of their facile ability to do so, the twilight region between the two, that murky area that incorporates irreducible elements of both, or perhaps of a third component newly created by the commingling of the others, is much less easily described. War and hatred are evil, love sublime. And yet: there are good men who could, if they wished, live in peace but who choose instead to fight; who could live a life of ease, but instead enjoy hardship; who could derive joy from lavishing riches on their beloved, but instead spend their wealth on warfare, toiling under the command of Ares rather than of Aphrodite, and even putting the former in the service of the latter.

Such is the complexity of humanity, which at times confounds even the gods, and ultimately prevents them from being mere celestial puppeteers, from representing the earth as a malleable stage set. The world in which men live and act, although not totally inexplicable, is not completely rational either. Reason and folly, the foreseen and the unexpected, madness and calm exist side by side, not only between two individuals but within the same person as well, all to different degrees. The contradictions of life, the simultaneous sorrow and relief at parting, the destruction inherent in creation itself, all these befuddle the mind, as well as illumine it. In my memoir thus far I have written of war and love as two separate entities, unrelated to each other, perhaps even in direct defiance of each other, one the sickness and the other the cure, each pushing and struggling like wrestlers for whom the dusty ring holds room for only one champion. It is time to move beyond such shallow poesy, for this is not life, nor is it my story.