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Ritual & Word Play
Steven Faulkner on Ancient & Modern Witnesses to a Fruitful Endowment
I found myself walking along a camel track with three old men on their way to a shrine on the ancient island of Crete. I was listening, because I have little to say at times like this, only questions. It was a hot day in June, sultry, with a warm wind off the sea, our sandals kicking the dust, stepping over donkey dung, and avoiding the roadside thistles. Sometimes we caught a glimpse of the ocean.
The Athenian Philosopher
The shrine was a long way off through broken country, so there was time to talk and time for me to listen. Klinias, something of an older statesman or politician in the area, pointed ahead to tall cypress trees where we could take shelter from the midday sun and rest. Megillus, our companion, was a listener, too. The other man was a stranger from Athens. I'd seen pictures of him: a balding man, still strong for his age, curly bearded with deep-set eyes, stoop-shouldered. He was the interesting one. He had words.
This Athenian was saying that all his words were given so that he might give due consideration to one concern: "by what means or manner of life we shall make our voyage over the sea of time to best purpose." And then, rather surprisingly, for he had just filled several hours of walking with discussions of the proper education of children, analyses of different kinds of political constitutions, and so forth—he glanced away toward the sea and said, "To be sure, man's life is a business which does not deserve to be taken too seriously." Klinias seemed confused, as was I.
The Athenian said, "I mean we should keep our seriousness for serious things, and not waste it on trifles, and that, while God is the real goal of all beneficent serious endeavor, man, as we said before, has been constructed as a toy for God, and this is, in fact, the finest thing about him."
The finest thing? We're toys? Puppets? After hours of serious talk about politics and wealth and education and the hazards of war as we walked and sweated, here he seemed to be throwing it all away. But this man was no fool.
He went on: "All of us, then, men and women alike, must fall in with our role and spend life in making our play as perfect as possible—to the complete inversion of current theory."
Play? And what constitutes play?
He stopped, and I can still see him gazing out to sea. "One should live out one's days playing at certain games—sacrificing, singing, and dancing."
The Georgetown Professor
Steven Faulkner teaches creative writing at Longwood University in southern Virginia. He is the author of Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts (2007) and Bitterroot: Echoes of Beauty and Loss (2016). Both books are memoirs of father-son journeys that followed the paths of missionary priests: Marquette (in Waterwalk) and De Smet (in Bitterroot).
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