The Current State of Ἀκαδήμεια

Where these venerable figures arrived our own age begins, in order to go further.
–Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling

Branches dappled the Mediterranean sun.  A coolness fell on the small, artificial valley of the excavation.  My back slowly bent into a scoliosis arc, unsupported, as I sat on an ancient slab.  But not even this could be uncomfortable for me.  I was trying and failing to cower at the birthplace of my discipline.

In the early morning of my second full day in Athens I stepped from the beautifully expansive metro system into the worst part of town.  It is, as my hostel prints in its guidebook, “the place where you don’t so much want to go.”  And it would be over a mile of walking before reaching my true destination, one of the core reasons for my trip to Greece.

I had crafted a poor, hand-drawn map of the street routes to the park that contained the archaeological site.  The risk in this only revealed itself as I walked down vacant traffic lanes—street after street without sidewalks and I had only just set out.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for a large park to the north of here.  Do you know the way?”
The taxi driver sighed as I handed him my journal; I hoped he could make out the street names from my cursive scrawl, streets so intimately familiar to his grizzled gaze.  I had mouthed my words slowly, but there was no possibility he knew English.
“Platonos?” He drawled.

“Uh…yes.”  That would almost definitely be the street I needed.  He gestured to the alley opposite to me with a chubby arm, signaled the number three with his fingers, then swooped rightward from the waist.  His arm went rigid.  I hoped this meant that at the third intersection down the alley I was to take a right, then go straight ‘till I hit the park.

It did, and upon arrival I immediately understood why this was not a popular tourist haunt.  The site was officially discovered only within the last half century, and parts of it are closed off to the public for further digging.  Those that are open are overgrown with weeds or else dotted with the worst sort of litter.  I found Athens was unclean wherever I went, but only here did this concern me.

My mother looked at me over our granite kitchen island.  “The caterers won’t be here until six, but this area will be closed off after that.  Just so you know.”  She gestured around me.
“What are they making?”
“Shellfish purée, candied bacon…if you have a request I can put a word in.”  That was a half-joke.
I turned to the left; out in the yard a few Mexicans were raising one of the snow-white tents over the frosted grass.  Fortunately the university provided outdoor eaters for the annual Christmas party.
“I just want a button here that will make a thousand glasses of orange juice if I press it a thousand times.”
After a moment she laughed awkwardly before turning to leave.  I closed my eyes.  It was a cruel thing to say, and there was almost no chance she would have known what I was quoting.

I had to squint even in the shade, as the swaying of the boughs turned the sunlight, normally stable in the cloudless Greek sky, fickle.  Somewhere there were owls, as I made out a steady thrum of hoots around me.  Slurpee cups and napkins dotted the dirt floor.

It was not just my own studies that came from here; it was also the heart of my parents’ and soon sister’s careers.  This was the first establishment dedicated to academic learning in the Western Hemisphere.  Philosophy was an unknown major in my family before me, but my no means did I fall far from the tree.

A martial arts teacher and his student were practicing kickboxing in the old gymnasium, quite near where I was sitting.  The teacher hawked a loogie onto the eroded marble slab next to him.  Later a Greek student came by with his dog, which promptly shit in the aisle of an ancient classroom.  He made to pick it up but thought better of it, even as he furtively avoided meeting the subdued horror in my eyes.

“This is where he taught.  Plato,” a woman said behind me, breaking my reveries.  Sunglasses concealed her true emotions, but she could tell I was a tourist.  “I know,” I said, pointing all around me.  “And there is more,” she pieced together in English, flailing her arms to the north.  It was indeed an extensive site.  No one knows where the Academy proper begins and where the gymnasium ends; it is likely they spilled into each other even from their founding.

The head of the Philosophy Department loomed over me as the tent heater hissed.  “I can tell you like big books,” he said peremptorily.  He threw some of that infernal candy-bacon into his mouth.  “I’ve never read Romola, but I know Eliot is challenging.  It’s good you are tackling such things.”

He spied my mother and strode out of the pavilion.  He was gawky from height, but would have been regardless by virtue of being a philosophy professor.  If he lived in Greece 2400 years ago he would have been a pederast.  Of course at some universities this is still common thanks to the carte blanche of tenure, however much this academic amenity (which, incidentally, is foreign to Denmark) provides freedom from intellectual persecution.  Its more common outgrowth is a wizened, vituperative insolence; for example we have those who hang loaded guns in their office under the accommodating auspices of the Second Amendment.

On viewing the trash around me I felt strongly compelled to pick it all up; there was a trashcan above the dig I could use.  But there was simply too much of it.  Even if I did dispose of it all, which would have taken the better part of a day, there would still be the grime or imprints it left in the earth, and my mind’s image of the place would be not as I made it but as it was found.  But I have friends at Northwestern who would gladly play this game, with wide smiles, scratching at the ground with spurs already worn from use by the time they graduated.  This is not a Sisyphean, dignified absurdity, but rather a cynical one, based on personal accomplishment and privation rather than universal ideals.  I could not play this game, exhausted even before reaching the park, demoralized at finding its present condition, and understanding that I have never lived outside academia.

“This is where it all happened,” I thought, looking over the stones and imagining the eager minds that once sat on them.  The didactic fury of Theaetetus, the glorious sophistry of Gorgias, and the sheer scope of The Republic, whose cave analogy, to my mind, represents the greatest summation of Western culture–all were born here.  The shadows began to lengthen in the pit, though it was not yet noon, even as the sun intensified beyond the Academy.  But Plato’s sun, I realized, had gone down for me long ago.  It was possible for it to rise again, but I felt as powerless as those shackled men in expediting that natural and indifferent process.  If we want it from mere volition, it would take an entirely new and naive intelligentsia.  And I resent myself for lacking the patience for that, even as my System-building classmates ooze it out their ears.

I thought about my first academic major, in Northwestern’s Integrated Science Program, an inanely prestigious institution that crammed every major scientific discipline into the time it takes an intelligent human to learn a programming language or two.  So many of its denizens could derive Maxwell’s Equations in their sleep yet had never bothered to look up the age of the universe.  So many dreamed of that ideal grant that would validate all the sleepless nights in the calculation-coal mine, in which the soul was reduced to a coughing canary.  So many will live fulfilling and likely famous lives in the warped world of academia, shivering with joy after every successful fellowship-joust.  No, I did not like ISP.

This Academy where I sat was the first of its kind.  By definition, then, it was forum over formula.  Plato did not teach his students so much as explode them, and they in turn upended his more meretricious arguments.  I do wonder if that kind of candor is widely available in today’s ‘information age.’  This half-gymnasium monstrosity of its day could encourage directly what in our age is little more than cheerfully incidental—the discovery of oneself.

I was born on a Friday.  On Monday my mother returned to lecturing.  “But Kathy knew she was a better administrator than a professor,” my father said to me as the metal backbone of the pavilion finally came down in the pale December sun.  “It was better suited to her own personality.  Naturally.  So she switched, and I don’t think she’s ever looked back.”

My mother is a first-generation college graduate and second generation Austrian immigrant.  Higher education was a precious and sanctified opportunity she worked herself raw to acquire and cultivate and extend, eventually formulate, finally dominate.  I will always remember the nights in my own Athens when she would stumble home to the farm late at night from a meeting with the faculty senate.  She would immediately strip.  She would collapse, nightgown-ed, at the kitchen table.  She would begin to narrate the simpering, vapid dramas of the evening.  Somehow, I know, this fulfilled her.  She owned it fully.  She had seen its ugly physiognomy form over decades, railing against it all the while but still finding the alacrity, time and again, to meet it in the coliseum.  But suckled as I was by its final sneering form I lacked such strength; her Pyrrhic courage is but my starting point, and I must go elsewhere for succor.

There was a metallic blue handbag resting on one of the Parian marble pedestals.  It was empty and stiff, as if it had been rained on and naturally dried by the sun numerous times.  Clearly it was abandoned.  I looked at the underside and saw that it was smeared with blood.  I took it and split my belongings between it and my bloated backpack.  Then I left to a nearby café that served only drinks, but where I successfully negotiated a sandwich.