One; or the Other

It is the last night of Frosh.

Eugene makes his way against the grain: through the campus events, under the canopy of excitement. He could go around the party but this is the quickest way. The fourth-year’s trip is away from his newly-leased place downtown, away from the booze, and to the small coffee house which sits on the hill. The coffee-craved student has been impressed by the Frosh proceedings this year: a dunk tank, an inflatable castle, a large ‘your face here’ picture of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and even a psychic fluent in the magical arts. His class didn’t get a blowup castle and he finds this slightly unfair. He stares at the fun to be had walking past, a strong desire to go jump around with the drunken first years. The maturity within stifles this desire, pointing him back towards his destination elevated off in the distance.

At this point Eugene knows the coffee shop and its inhabitants fairly well. The monks there are adorned in their brown robes high, high on the mountain’s shelf. The clergy in the front, thousands of small, roasted brains sealed in storage in the back room. Money in between. The occupants sip tall wares watching far below where antics abound. He must ascend to this plateau, to maybe do some reading or surf the net. Whatever it is he will be safe up there, because tonight the creature is loose. It lives in all of us but tonight the hunt is externalized: an army of spinal cords.

The lone traveller moves off the path so as to allow an approaching mob of Frosh to stampede past him.

Unchained males, waving banners of vitriol and weapons of penetration. They swing not towards the beast, but some opposition. Steel on steel. Their mistresses tie their handkerchiefs around their knight’s lances, spurring on the carnal. These misguided children who adhere to the old gods, all that avails for them is flight. Somewhere off in the distance sirens can be heard, and that is surely where this group shall shore up. It is the sound of the party, drawing them closer.

Eugene moves back onto the path, continuing on away from this. While it holds no relevancy for him anymore, he does admit that when you’re there, it’s good.

The noble retreat from that whole emotional practice. With age comes a shift from reckless warrior to a student of the sciences and a drinker of coffee. Instead of garnishing the complexities of life as a spontaneous drunkard, he moved on to something a bit more lateral. After all, trying to script a genuinely novel life had been hard. Now his fulfillment comes from the script of genuine knowledge --the latest academia-- and how he can better apply his ever-expanding knowledge base to it. He is a bishop of productivity.

The traveller finally achieves his summit and is greeted by the calculated ambience. He can’t really put his finger on the artist at play, but guesses it’s likely available for sale if he wanted to find out. Instead of this he orders a latte and stands there watching the milksmith forge out a blade whose edge will weather the strikes of lethargy. Upon receiving the tool, and sheathing the instrument for heat safety, he takes a seat at an open table.

Beside him a trio of extroverts are engaged in the kind of talk conducted at a volume decidedly worthy of a stranger’s attention, and Eugene is strange enough to listen. Their words crash off each other, trying to break through. They enjoy these little debates; no doubt it’s an ongoing thing. Of the three people one is a female, and one has a beard.
“So I need one philosophy elective, either Vance or Gaard’s class. Which one should I take?”

“OK, definitely Vance. Know why he loves Plato, and the Greeks? He says that those post-Egyptians came to be schooled in the same ‘universal source code’ which saw the pyramids built, among other things. The sacred is the most interesting of truths. Socrates would not even write it down; Plato did in part, giving us the geometric key; and Aristotle would constantly allude to the ‘real’ philosophy, unwritten and passed only in initiate confidence. It’s cryptic, it’s been purposely obscured, but it’s the whole foundation for Western Philosophy. Since then, the discussion has slowly moved away from the objective....it’s gotten boring.”

“You haven’t had a class with Gaard, though, she’s about as far from boring as it gets. Did you know she can whistle Wagner compositions? She does, in class, over her phone’s speaker, from her house. That’s how much free time she has on account of the end of philosophy. You see all this idealist stuff is tiresome when today the discussion has arrived at language. Gaard is student of Wittgenstein, and of the power and limits of logic. Not the spiritual hermetics of the Greeks, but the indifferent conclusions of deduction, and we have them. These abstractions of unknowing that Plato mistakes for being somehow more real, Wittgenstein checkmates them with the Tractatus, for it shows all philosophical problems to be simple misuses of language. Words like ‘Truth,’ or ‘truth,’ or ‘sacred,’ or ‘word,’ they have no definition outside of how they are used. It is a simple, elegant argument: that for which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.”

“Or...”

“Or, what?”

“Well, Femer teaches Hegel.”

“...I just got deja-vu there for a second.”

“Well, Femer teaches Hegel.”

“That’s not funny.”

The coffee shop closes and Eugene makes his way down the mountain path towards the city. Nearing the campus again he notices the inflatable castle is now nothing but a placid pool of plastic, flat on the ground. A certain silence enlists on the campus but he can still hear the sirens in the distance, and the battle. Steel on steel.