The aristos

It is a common childish conceit that we are royal foundlings.  That we were stolen away from our natural blue-blooded parents by gypsies, and grew up amidst alien corn, barely enduring the grossness of our foster-parents who dare to call themselves our mother and father.  Perhaps this is just a natural reaction to the sheer contingency of life; not so much why me? as why them?  We try to imagine how our lives would have been if we had been born to someone else - blissfully unaware of the contradiction which lies at the heart of these speculations. 

Recently I have experienced once again this bridling at the petty constraints imposed by the given contours of my life.  Although I should hasten to add that this has not been directed against my parents. It has to do with my intellectual genealogy.  This differs from the purely genetic form in that we can shape and alter what we are mentally, to a certain extent at least.  And we must therefore bear responsibility for what we have become from what we were. As far as our chromosomes are concerned, we are absolved.

These thoughts have been prompted by reading Eco's The Name of the Rose.  Aside from its own very studied intellectuality, which seems to call across disciplines from practitioner to initiate, its harping - anachronistic in fact - on the Greek learning of the fourteenth century re-awoke in me my feelings for that language.

It is some five or six years since I learnt and read Classical Greek.  Stumbling again, painfully, through some easy Herodotus was like entering rooms kept locked for years, blowing away thick cobwebs from the furniture which began once more to evoke memories of happy, earlier times.  As my mind got into the very particular and wonderful grove of the language, I felt an old power begin to surge through me.

As each ‘men’ was answered by the ineluctable ‘de’; as each meticulously plotted tense change moved along the sentence; and as each constructed word unfolded before me, its components fitting together like an intricate mechanism, and yet with a freshness and pristine beauty of language which we have lost many years ago, I felt that same sudden, childish pang which most of us felt at some time in our earliest years.

I felt as if cast out, and stumbling upon a never-forgotten inheritance.  It was like finding an ancient sword and shield, dull and lustreless, but demonstrably part of an older, nobler order which was once yours.  As I traced the steely-sharp logic of that language which is built for discourse, and as I crawled along the mental assault course for which I was now so unfit, I realised what I had left behind.  I had forgone - or so it seemed - that perfect clarity of vision, that sense of the horizon which had once been a constant part of my life. I felt beggared. 

But all was not lost. In discovering what I had loosened my grip on, I also discovered what I once had.  Like a child who has found incontrovertible proof - a royal birthmark, say - of superior origins, I had found my own mark: of intellectual aristocracy. 

(10.9.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - “to proto alouminocarto”

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