Hi, Weekenders!
@Galenkp got us some interesting topics for the weekend! You can check them out here: Weekend-Engagement writing topics: WEEK 161, and perhaps you'll want to join in 😀
We teachers are public people, but usually, and this is my case, without the fame, glamour, and money of other public personalities. As I see it, we have very little freedom; and I don't think I can solve it with courage. So when I saw that we could interpret a Thucydides' quote, I said to myself, "this is it." I started yesterday as I headed for the Bus station to catch the bus home.
Choosing the perfect seat to use my time machine
I boarded the bus an hour later than expected, 3 p.m., and sat in an empty seat in the back, away from the driver and his partner. A minute earlier they were trying to talk to me and were asking too many questions. Something smelled fishy.
The driver and his co-driver were the typical tricksters; they laughed and told jokes while we waited for the rest of the passengers. They were marinating us so they could grill us well. They stopped at a gas station on the road, ten minutes away, and made us wait there in the bus while they queued for gasoil, which is illegal. They must do that with an empty bus.
I Thought about writing about that: drivers buying extra gasoil and reselling it, making passengers waste their time; we have it partly as a consequence of being resilient and having become too supportive when it comes to gas and other misfortunes...
It had been more than an hour since we had boarded the bus. I thought about getting off and complaining to the driver about his abuse, but then I thought it was already late to go back to the terminal and take another bus; I really wanted to get home, and I didn't want to travel with a driver in a bad mood.
I pondered my options for not letting the Hulk out as I read the quote over and over again:
The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage.
Thucydides
Well, courage was not my choice, nor that of anyone else.
My short talk with Thucydides
People were angry, bored, and sleepy. Not a single corageous person there.
I pushed the red button of my time machine, went back in time to see Thucydides.
Imagine something like The Peripheral; people should think I was asleep.
The first problem I had to face was my gender. My first thought was of me and my buddy Thucy having some calda at a decent thermopolia, but that wasn't going to happen; it was not Sparta. So when I got there, I had to dress up and improvise--perhaps I'll tell you about it on another post 😉--. The thing is we got to talk for a minute:
"What do you think of happiness, sir?" I Asked him straight. He looked at me like as I was babbling. He continued fixing his tunic and asked me:
"What?"
Then I rephrased:
"Do you think a man can find happiness?"
He probably would never have shared his ideas with a woman, let alone in my circumstances, but ego works wonders. He answered proverbially as did any ancient Greek on Wikipedia.
"Well, only a man who is free can find happiness."
"Oh, and how can you be free in these lands of war, sir?"
"In order to overcome war and its terrors, a man needs to be brave."
He seemed to have all the thing figured out. I looked him in the eye and couldn't help myself:
"But brave men need to be strong as well, according to your standards; what about the elderly, the children, us women? And I continued; I was frantic. "How can you tell the freedom of a country from individual freedom? You are strong and brave, go to war, get shell-shocked then what? How do you find happiness after that? How can men be happy after they have seen their youths pay such a price?"
Thucydides gave me that look only men from Ancient Greece who have been visited and interrogated by a madwoman from the future can give you, and asked:
"Shell-shocked?"
It's late fourth century BC, and because of his experience and remarkable intellect and education, Thucydides is sure that "the secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage." And I'm sure he knows happiness is a myth but won't write that volume.
Anachronisms aren't good in this business of traveling between eras. I pushed the red button and dashed.
The Secret to Happiness
Like any man who had to live through war, illness, and probably exile, Athenian historian and general Thucydides learned firsthand that the strongest determine the chances of the weakest.
As an agnostic, I'm hooked. Thucydides stripped history of divinity and its "fantasies" and presented us with a humanist vision of man, naked of gods, armed with his own courage, forger of his future. He was a thinker born of the first intellectual revolution ever to take place in the history of Western man; it was like out of the blue, brains had come into fashion.
Blooming Athens, his home, was resisting the domination of Sparta, and this was after years earlier Sparta had sent them help against Persia, those famous 300 at the Battle of Thermopylae--You may remember the most famous abs in Hollywood movies; I'll never forget those 🙈--; and then, another turn of the screw. Freedom was an issue because domination was an issue. So it seems that we cannot all be free at the same time. Therein lies the myth.
Myths can't be solved. They just are. Happiness is there; go find it. Then we go find that happiness. Modern "wisemen" write self-help books--I apologize if you read those; you must have your reasons, and there must be some great ones; I couldn't tell--, and tell us ancient stories in the guise of new elucubrations. These stories show us characters who travel long distances in their quest of their personal Holy Grail, just to realize the Grail was with them all the time while they were just not experienced enough, wise enough, mature enough, or just not willing enough to see it. You read that book and have an epiphany, and yet you can't tell if your happy. Probably you're not. But hey, you go find it again, only that this time, you look for it inside yourself; hopefully, you will soon realize that that Grail is not a cup stuck in your ribs.
The myth of happiness has nurtured so many philosophies. Who doesn't want to be happy or free? Who wants to be called a coward?
We'll always try to find happiness, that personal Grail or that of the country, and when necessary, we will arm ourselves with courage to free ourselves from those who oppress us. Some of us will die. There will be happy moments that we will treasure, others we will take for granted, like when you take your bus home without dealing with abusive drivers who in turn have to deal with abusive security forces who in turn have to deal with an abusive government.
This was the bus, BTW. I arrived in Cumaná at 6:45 p.m., three hours later than expected, tired and starving. And it's OK to say I was happy I was home.
Thank you so much for your visit :)
All text and images are my own. I have taken the pictures with my Redmi 9T cell phone. And if any GIFs here, I've used GIPHY for all them.
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