“Waterloo” is an original short story. Click here to download the eBook version.

The leaves hadn’t yet turned to the full colors of autumn and were still clinging to a tinge of verdant summer. Driving north on the gentle curves of Route 7 in Vermont, Jonathan admired the leaves’ tenacity in the face of the advancing cold. Next to him sat his girlfriend reclined far back in her seat and staring absently out the passenger window.

“I used to love driving back to school this way after fall break,” Jonathan said, “It’s surprising how much earlier the leaves change up here than the ones at home.”

“Sorry, what?” Allison said. “I wasn’t listening.”

“Nothing. I was just admiring the leaves.”

She turned her head toward him. “Yes, they’re pretty. Have you ever read Leaves of Grass?”

“No, I’m behind on my Whitman.”

“Really? My friends were just talking about it. I memorized one of the poems back in boarding school:

O slender leaves, O blossoms of my blood
I permit you to tell
in your own way of the heart that is under you,
I do not know what you mean there underneath yourselves,
you are not happiness,
You are often more bitter than I can bear,
you burn and sting me,
Yet you are beautiful to me you faint tinged roots,
you make me think of death

“Wow,” he blinked. “I agree the leaves are beautiful, but I’m not sure they make me think of death.”

“Well, that’s what the colors are. Their death song.”

“Sure,” he said, “they die in the fall, but they’re reborn in the spring. It’s the endless cycle of death and rebirth.”

“Yeah, the roots survive, but the old leaves don’t come back. They stay dead.”

“Lovely,” he said. Allison went back to staring out the window.

They passed a sign: Waterloo: 30 miles. Burlington: 120 miles.

“We’re getting close now. It feels weird. I haven’t been back here since graduation.”

He had graduated four years earlier from Waterloo College, a small liberal arts university nestled in a picturesque valley of the Green Mountains. His memories of school were bittersweet, and he had never thought of returning until now. He was going to seek guidance from three of his former professors on his plans graduate school.

In college, he had majored in philosophy and dreamed of being a professor. The vibrant world of ideas, far from the esoteric abstractions most imagined, was a tangible place that awakened in him a sense of wonder and exhilaration. To grapple with the problems of existence, to learn from history’s great thinkers, to share in the intellectual mystique of his heroes, gave him a sense purpose and relief from the melancholy of ordinary life. He envisioned himself living the life of the mind as a distinguished member of the field. His professors encouraged his budding aspirations.

Despite a promising start, his plans were derailed in his senior year when he found himself afflicted with a crippling case of writer’s block. It manifested not long after Jonathan’s father had succumbed to a heart attack in the summer after junior year. Outwardly, Jonathan was unfazed, but inwardly his emotions conspired to thwart his ambition. Writing became a Sisyphean task. He spent countless hours hunched at the keyboard writing and rewriting the same paragraphs. Overdue papers piled up and his grades declined. He graduated on the strength of his earlier achievements and the good graces of his professors, who were as baffled as he was by his erratic behavior.

Instead of marching on to graduate school, he had retreated to his home state of New York and taken a job in sales with a university press in Midtown. He rented a studio apartment in Queens and rode the subway to work. The corporate life, steeped in neutral colors and artificial light, put money in his pocket but deadened his soul. He bided his time and plotted his comeback, determined to return to the rarified air of academia from his peripheral exile. It was only a matter of time until he was reunited with his calling and realized his potential.

As a first step, he began auditing a graduate Metaphysics seminar at NYU. He took on a double life — textbook salesman by day, ersatz grad student by night. It was there that he met Allison, a second year PhD student in philosophy. Allison was the type of academic prodigy that he desperately wanted to emulate. Her father was a tenured professor of philosophy. She had attended an elite New England prep school and graduated with honors from Princeton, arriving at NYU bristling with scholarly promise.

After class one day, the professor had taken the group for drinks at a dive bar in Greenwich Village. Jonathan had gotten into a conversation with Allison about Aristotle and noticed her watching his lips move as he talked, as though she were thinking of kissing him. This subtle gesture emboldened him to ask her out the following weekend to a student play uptown at Columbia. Hence began a precarious romance fueled by opposing desires – Allison was bored with the confines of academia and eager to glimpse life outside the ivy walls, while Jonathan longed for something that would bring him closer to that same cloistered world. It was a strange pairing of insider and outsider. What they did share was a knack for ridiculing the people in their class and sparring over ontology.

It was Allison who had encouraged him to go see his former professors. For several months, he had been struggling with writing sample on Plato’s Symposium but was unable to divine a clear thesis from the churning torrent of his thoughts. His attempts to explain his work to his friends and family ended invariably in mutual frustration. “Do you feel alone in this endeavor?” Allison had said as he lamented his lack of progress. “You should talk to the experts in your topic.”

He had wanted to have his writing sample and GREs in hand before asking for recommendations, but he couldn’t deny the plain logic of her suggestion. He needed to try something different to escape the web of perplexity that had entangled him. Further, Allison had bolstered his courage by offering to go with him. Not only did he envision her company lightening his the mood, but returning to campus with a scholar of her caliber at his side could only enhance his aura of legitimacy. The trip was a ray of hope, an isolated patch of blue sky among gathering rain clouds. He saw a chance to redeem himself and was grateful for a formidable ally in his quest.

They had rented a cabin on a small lake a few miles from campus. The sun was setting as they arrived. Jonathan unpacked as Allison walked around the lake and took pictures with her old 35mm camera. He was looking over the draft on his laptop when she walked in.

“It’s so beautiful out there — just like Walden Pond. I’d love to spend a year in a cabin like this and just study the plants and wildlife, making detailed notes and sketches like Darwin. I’d write poems about the smallest details of a maple leaf or a fallen log or a sparrow,” she said, winding up the depleted roll of film in her camera.

“That sounds wonderful,” he murmured, staring at his laptop screen.

She noticed his tense expression. “How’s it going over there?”

“Okay, I guess. I just hope my professors can make some sense of this,” he said.

“I’m sure they’ll do the best they can. You made the right decision to come here,” she said, resting a hand on his shoulder.

“Did you read the draft I sent you?”

She paused. “I skimmed it, but I didn’t have time to read it closely. It kind of got filed away in the pile of other papers I’m reading.”

“What did you think?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It’s very different from the papers I typically read, but ancient philosophy really isn’t my area. My focus is contemporary analytic philosophy. I’m used to applying rigorous logic to solve philosophical problems rather than doing exegesis of historical figures. I think if you spend too much time on the history of philosophy you end up getting lost in the text and not engaging with the problems themselves.”

“Are you saying I’m wasting my time?”

“Not at all,” she said, placing the used film roll in a canister and snapping the lid closed with finality. “I think the stuff you’re interested in is fascinating. It’s just not the kind of thing that my peers or I work on.”

Allison yawned. “I’m really beat. I think I’m going to call it a night. You?”

“I’m going to stay up and make a few revisions. I want to send out the latest version before my meetings tomorrow.”

“Okay.” She went into the bathroom and began washing her face. “This water smells like sulphur.”

“They warned me about that at the lodge,” he said. “It’s untreated well water, but they said it’s perfectly safe. Welcome to the rustic life.”

Allison came out of the bathroom and stretched out her lanky frame on the full-size bed. She was asleep in minutes.

Jonathan stayed up pecking at his keyboard. After an hour he rubbed his forehead and sighed. There was a dull pressure pulsing behind his eyes, a familiar feeling when he tried to write. He found his bag on the nightstand and pulled a pack of cigarettes from the front pocket. He had stopped smoking nine months ago but found that this trip gave him an irresistible craving for nicotine.

Stepping outside into the crisp air, he lit a cigarette and gazed up at the stars. The crystal clear sky of the northern woods arched above him. He saw Pisces, Andromeda and Cassiopeia, the fall constellations that had overthrown their summer predecessors. He thought about the distance to the closest stars, across which not even light could travel during his flicker of a lifetime. Even in the prime of his life, the infinite space above reminded him that he was doomed to die. He finished his cigarette, stepped on the glowing ember, and went back inside.

Allison was sprawled across the bed and breathing heavily. He got undressed and laid down beside her. The sound of her breathing accompanied the spinning of his thoughts about the day to come. Finally, he drifted off and slept fitfully on the cramped bed.

Jonathan dreamt that he was at a bar with Allison. She was ready to leave, but he had taken off his shoes and couldn’t find them anywhere. Finally finding them buried in a big pile of abandoned shoes in the back, he saw that Allison had already transversed the parking lot to their car. He hurried toward her,  and that the parking lot was immersed under a shallow pool of water with paths zigzagging across like a maze. He tried to choose a path, but found that wherever he stepped, his feet sank into the chilly water.

* * *

Jonathan’s alarm sounded at 7 a.m. the next morning. Pale sunlight was flooding through the windows. The cabin was cold, and he could see his breath. Allison, still sleeping, was curled tightly in the blanket on the opposite side of the bed. He showered and dressed for the day in a pair of slacks and a striped button down shirt that he had bought for the trip, his newly minted professional appearance signaling the distance he had come from his days as a disheveled undergraduate.

While gathering his things, Allison awoke, stretching languidly. “Good morning,” she said. “Did you sleep well?”

“No, I was thinking too much about my meetings today.”

“I’m sorry, that’s terrible. I slept like a stone.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Do you want to grab breakfast before I head to campus? I know a little place in town that has the best pancakes.” He was looking forward to bringing her to one of his old college haunts.

“Thanks, but I don’t think so,” she said. “I try not to go out before I’m showered.”

“No problem,” he said, turning and pushing a pile of notes into his bag.

“I can meet you on campus later, though. I do want to check out the architecture. I’m going to do some reading here and then start walking over.”

“Okay. My first meeting is at ten. I’ll call you when I’m finishing up.” He picked up his bag and walked purposefully toward the door.

Linda’s Diner was tucked away on a shady backstreet in downtown Waterloo. He parked out front and wolfed down a breakfast of bacon and pancakes covered in maple syrup. He had eaten the same breakfast many times before in college, often sitting alone at the counter like now. As usual, the customers were an oil-and-water blend of locals wearing plaid shirts and trucker hats with preppy fraternity brothers recounting the war stories of last night’s party. He finished his coffee and asked for a refill, hoping to clear the cobwebs from his mind.

After breakfast, he drove a few blocks to the visitor parking lot on campus. The lot was at the bottom of the hill with the ivory tower looming above. The campus was just as he remembered it, like a finely-detailed fossil preserved in amber. At the center was a tall chapel with a gilded steeple, symbolizing the school’s mission of the search for God and truth. Old stone buildings formed the venerable core around the chapel, surrounded by modern architecture named after wealthy donors. A reflective pond sparkled at the base of the hill, acting as a mirror for the campus to eternally admire its own beauty.

He walked up the steep path to the quad, absorbing the strange familiarity. This Shangri-La, shielded from the vagaries of time, reminded him of how much he himself had changed. He was no longer part of this world, if he ever had been. Even in college, he had felt less like a participant than an observer peering into an illusory snow globe or perusing the alluring pages of a glossy college brochure. Coming back years later, felt less like revisiting a real part of his past than the recurrence of a repeating dream. But here he was, climbing the hill again in hopes of returning as Prometheus with some glowing insight that would dispel his confusion like mist in the morning sun.

The philosophy building stood opposite the chapel. It looked like a gingerbread house of brown and pink stone, imposing in its playfulness. He took a deep breath and entered through the massive wooden double doors, taking in the cool air and familiar smell of old books and stale coffee. Ten minutes early, he decided  to wait in the lounge.

Professor MacKay, his old Philosophy of Language teacher, was brewing a cup of tea in the kitchenette and talking to a new, unfamiliar faculty member. Jonathan had taken MacKay’s class in his worst semester and had never handed in his final paper. He knew MacKay was no fan of his. As MacKay glanced over and saw him sitting on the couch by the coffee table, Jonathan waved half-heartedly. MacKay managed an awkward smile and returned to his conversation, leaving moments later without saying a word. Striving to remain impassive, Jonathan focused on the meetings ahead.

His first meeting was with his old advisor, Professor Dan Henkel. Henkel had been his favorite professor and had sparked his interest in philosophy. No one embodied the charisma and erudition that he aspired to as well as Henkel. Fluent in Latin, Greek, and French, he unpacked the arguments of ancient texts with precise logic and poetic flourishes. His lectures earned him the adoration of both sexes, as he unraveled complex concepts with the dexterity of a cat pulling apart a twisted ball of yarn.

At the scheduled time, Jonathan headed for Henkel’s office. There was a student inside, and he saw Henkel making evocative hand gestures as he spoke. A smile crept across his face as his old conversations with Henkel flooded back to him. Henkel looked up to see his former student standing in the doorway.

“Hi, Jon,” he said without missing a beat. “Just finishing up. Give me a moment.”

Jonathan nodded and stepped outside. “So, when Pascal says, ‘The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing’,” he heard Henkel say, “I don’t think he’s saying that faith and reason are incompatible. For Pascal, our wretchedness consists in reason’s alienation from the heart. Reason is limited to the intelligible and can’t tell us why we were born, what we have to do on Earth, or what will become of us when we die. The heart keeps reason from veering into skepticism, while reason steers the heart away from dogmatism. I would explore that dichotomy as you’re discussing Pascal’s Wager in your paper.” The student walked out a moment later in an apparent daze.

“Come in, Jon,” Henkel called.

Jonathan entered and sat down. The office was illuminated by two tall windows and cluttered with books, papers and arcane souvenirs that made it feel like a well lived-in study. Henkel was wearing a wrinkled white button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His dark eyes sparkled with the same mirror-like intensity. He hadn’t changed, except that his dark curly hair was now cut short and salted with gray.

“It’s good to see you, Henkel,” Jonathan said cheerfully. “How have you been?” Everyone called Henkel by his last name, though Jonathan now wondered if “Dan” were more appropriate, given how long they had known each other.

“Good. Just a bit older and wiser, I suppose. And you?”

“Older but not any wiser,” Jon grinned. “I’m finding post-college life to be, uh, an adventure. Oh, Professor Robertson says hello. I’ve been auditing his Metaphysics seminar at NYU. He said you knew each other in grad school.”

“Robertson? Of course. I’m afraid he still looks like a grad student, but the same can’t be said of me. It’s like the old story, ‘Beauty and The Gray Beast’. So what’s on your mind, Jon?” He leaned forward solicitously.

“Well, as I said in my email, I’m planning to apply to PhD programs this fall. I’ve been working for a few years now, but I think I’m finally ready to go back to school. I’ve been working on a writing sample on Plato’s Symposium, but I seem to going in circles. Did you have time to look at the draft?” He bent down and pulled a copy from his bag.

“I did, but I think it’s better if you explain to me what you’re thinking.”

“Sure,” Jonathan cleared his throat. “I’m focused on the passage in the Symposium where Socrates talks about his encounter with the priestess Diotima. He says Diotima educated him in the ways of love, and he offers to share his experience with the other men who have gathered to give speeches in praise of Eros. Eros, she tells Socrates, is neither good, nor wise, nor beautiful as others have claimed. Rather, as a lover of Aphrodite, he is an intermediary between men and gods, who is always moving between the polar opposites of good and evil, wisdom and ignorance, beauty and ugliness.

Warming to his explanation, he continued.  “Those initiated in the rites of love begin by being drawn toward beautiful bodies. If they follow the path where Eros leads, they begin to love the beauty of souls, then the beauty of laws and customs, and finally — for those able to make the climb — they find themselves in a boundless sea of beauty and glimpse the Beautiful Itself. The devoted lover of beauty ascends each of these stages like steps on a staircase.”

“As one climbs the stairs of love,” he expanded, “they are drawn to higher and higher orders of beauty, until they glimpse the naked form of Beauty itself — the changeless, eternal beauty in which all beautiful things partake. While a beautiful individual can only possess beauty imperfectly — relatively or for a short period of time — Beauty itself is perfect, unchanging and immortal. Gazing upon Beauty itself causes one to become pregnant in spirit and ‘give birth in beauty’ to true virtue and happiness, instead of the false images of happiness that we often pursue. Just like physical beauty leads to pregnancy in body, Diotima says, beauty itself leads to pregnancy in soul. To give birth in beauty is the ultimate aim of love, which she claims is the closest to immortality that mortals like us can hope to achieve.”

“I think that’s an eloquent summary,” Henkel said with his eyes twinkling, “but take me more into your thinking. What do you see as your contribution to the scholarship?”

“Well, what I’m trying to argue is that the usual reading of the passage misses the mark. It says that Diotima’s ascent is about changing the object of our desires. On this reading, you move from loving individual bodies to loving universal forms. The goal is a pure ‘Platonic love’ free of attachment to the physical world. But there’s a problem with this view. It entails that, as you climb each step, you leave behind the original object of desire. First, you love those with beautiful bodies, then those with beautiful souls, and then no one in particular, just abstract forms. So you can only understand why you loved something after you’ve moved onto something else.”

Henkel smiled. “Right, as Joni Mitchell says, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. I can’t imagine that is what Plato is advocating here. So what is your reading of the passage?”

Pursing his lips, Jonathan shook his head. “That’s exactly where I’m struggling. I don’t think Plato wants us to hate the body or abandon our loved ones in pursuit of otherworldly forms. I think the ascent concerns how we love more than what we love. In the first stage, one is driven by the appetite for a beautiful body. We experience desire as a lack that needs to be filled like an empty stomach, and the beautiful as an object to be consumed like a feast. By the final stage, when we discover the “sea of beauty”, our desire becomes “boundless” and focused on contemplation, not consumption, of beauty. Beauty is what inspires our desire and capacity for good, not what satisfies it. It opens our eyes to higher and higher levels of value within the same beloved. But how does this happen? What does Diotima mean by fullness in lack? Why do we need bodily appetites if they only confuse the soul’s desire for knowledge?”

Henkel rested his chin in his palm. “I think you’re asking the right questions, Jon. It might help if you consider Socrates’s speech as a counterpoint to Aristophanes’s speech about love. Aristophanes claims that love is the desire for wholeness, for one’s missing half. True to his art as a comic poet, he illustrates this through a comic and tragic myth. In the beginning, he says, human beings were fused together as circular beings with four arms and four legs and came in every sexual pairing imaginable — man and woman, two men, and two women. Perfect in their circular form, they moved by rolling end over end.

Unhinging his clasped hands, Henkel mused aloud.  “In their original state of wholeness, the circle people were very powerful and mounted an assault on Mount Olympus in hopes of overthrowing the gods and ruling over themselves. As punishment for their hubris, Zeus rendered them asunder by dividing them in two. At first, human beings despaired on their missing halves and let themselves starve to death. The jealous gods, reluctant to forfeit human praise, granted them sexual organs and allowed them to face each other during intercourse, so they could enjoy an approximation of their former unity. The lovers’ embrace gives us the wholeness we crave, but only momentarily,” Henkel said, pulling his clasped hands apart. “What humans call love is just the longing for an original wholeness lost in our fall from grace. We spend our whole lives searching for this, says Aristophanes, since it can never be wholly satisfied.”

“Diotima’s rejoinder is that it only makes sense to look for a missing half if you assume the whole to be good. As proof, she says people are even willing to cut off their own limbs if they become infected and do them more harm than good. We tend to reject what we consider bad and define the self by our conception of what is good, not by our physical constitution. We seek to make the good our own and divest ourselves of the bad. Apply that insight to the circle people. Would reuniting with their other half be good for them? Not if it would simply restore their original hubris — they would still feel tyrannized by the gods and end up reliving the same old tragedy. Without reflecting on the worthiness of their desires, the people in the myth pursue wholeness out of ignorance. The body’s desires for wholeness aren’t wrong, just partial and incomplete. Diotima points the way to a boundless desire for beauty that doesn’t supply our missing piece so much as open our eyes to a larger type of whole.”

Jonathan took notes as Henkel spoke. “That’s really interesting,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of Diotima’s speech as a counterpoint to Aristophanes.”

“I hope it gives you a new avenue to explore. Plato is not really my specialty, though. Professor Valentin is the real authority. When I write about Plato, I always picture her standing over my shoulder.”

Jonathan paused to consider the image. “Thanks, Henkel. Will you write me a recommendation when the time comes?”

“Of course, Jon.”

Jonathan left Henkel’s office energized by the old esprit of philosophical dialogue. He had forgotten the thrilling incisiveness of Henkel’s thinking, which both inspired him and made him feel like a feeble amateur in comparison. As usual he didn’t grasp everything Henkel had said, but he felt that the answers he had been seeking lay hidden somewhere in the depths of his commentary. In his fall from Olympus and search for restoration, Jonathan thought, he was not unlike the circle people in the myth. All he had to do was mine the notes he had taken for the missing pieces that would finally bring his writing to completion and resurrect the wholeness of his aspirations.

His next meeting was with Rosalind Marsh, a noted scholar of Nietzsche and German Continental philosophy. He climbed the stairs to her office on the second floor and found her sitting behind her desk, grading papers and sipping from a cup of hot tea. Unlike Henkel’s bright and cozy study, Marsh’s office was windowless and barren. Marsh herself was quite pale as though she were allergic to sunlight. She wore a plain black turtleneck and dark, chin-length hair framed her round face. Her deathly pallor would have been more alarming had she not looked the virtually same since he had known her. In fact, her disarming sickliness and unadorned style were part of what he liked about her. Her indifference to appearances belied her impressive accomplishments.

He knocked and she looked up with a crooked smile. “Hi, Jonathan. Come in.”

He took a seat in front of her uncluttered desk. “Hi, Professor Marsh. Long time, no see.”

“Yes, time marches on, with or without us,” she said gloomily. “You’re looking well, though. I almost didn’t recognize you. Last time I saw you, you had long hair and were barely keeping your head above water. So, what’s going on?” Marsh folded her frail hands on the desk in front of her.

“I wanted to talk to you about my plans for grad school and get your help with my writing sample. I’m not sure if you had a chance to look at my draft.”

“Yes, I would have sent you some comments, but I struggle with writing comments the same way you struggle with your own writing.” Marsh had a knack for self-deprecation.

“So do you think I’m headed in the right direction?”

Marsh squinted in concentration. “Well, as a Nietzschean, it’s hard for me to believe there are eternal beings that transcend the temporal world. Nietzsche would argue that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are metaphysical fictions. In Beyond Good and Evil, he calls Plato’s invention of the Good itself, ‘the most dangerous error in human history’. The claim that there is a higher reality beyond appearances, and that we can know this reality through reason alone, is untenable from my perspective. For Nietzsche, the postulation of pure beings knowable only by reason is just the sublimation of our will to power. It’s impossible to nail down what Plato means by the Beautiful itself or how it confers beauty of physical things. That’s why Nietzsche wrote to his friend, ‘Give up, Plato. You are embracing a cloud.’” She paused to take a sip from her chipped mug.

“That’s a fair objection,” Jonathan agreed. “I guess my response would be that Plato doesn’t insist on a strict separation between forms and the physical world. He treats the sensible as an image of the intelligible and appetite as an image of the rational desire. Reason is what guides our desires into order and satisfies our inarticulate craving for wholeness. Ultimately, appetite is assimilated to reason in a well-ordered soul. The point of Diotima’s ascent is that starting with base desires provides a path to the higher ones. But it’s probably beyond the scope of my paper to address Nietzsche’s critique.”

“That’s fine, but you should anticipate possible objections that readers on the committee might have. I would address the most pressing concerns after you’ve set out your view. That brings me to my other point – I’m not sure I followed the argument for your interpretation.”

“That’s where I need help. Henkel thinks that I should interpret it as a counterpoint to Aristophanes’ speech. He says that…”

“Forget about what Dan thinks,” she interjected, “What do you think?”

Jonathan stared up at the ceiling. “I’m not sure. I guess I want to say that the stages of the ascent are about transforming our desires, but not by abandoning the physical world for the world of forms. The lover of wisdom moves from the desire to consume beauty to the desire to contemplate beauty, which leads to the emergence of ever increasing value within the beloved. Plato doesn’t want us to abandon the body and the senses; he wants us to use them as stepping stones toward expanding our conception of the good.”

Marsh started to cough consumptively and then regained her composure. “I think that sounds right, but I’m too far removed from the text to have a strong view. Have you spoken to Valentin?”

Jonathan took her deferral as a sign that they had exhausted her insight on the topic. They used the rest of the time to talk about where he was going to apply. “I really like Rosen’s work on Plato,” he said, “so I was thinking of applying to Boston University.”

She grimaced. “Well, as you may know, there are warring camps within ancient philosophy. It’s important not to choose sides, but if you go to BU to work with Rosen, you will have chosen a side. You should also consider Chapel Hill and Notre Dame. They’re both very strong in ancient.”

Jonathan nodded while thinking that he would be lucky to get into any of these schools with his spotty transcripts. He thanked Marsh for her time and she bid him good luck.

After his meeting with Marsh, Jonathan felt a malaise creeping over him as if her poor health were contagious. He wasn’t surprised by her dim view of Plato but started to wonder if he was indeed “embracing a cloud”. Maybe the clarity he sought didn’t exist. He had hoped Marsh would help him wade through Henkel’s insights, but instead her skepticism seemed to deflate his points. Both had pointed to Valentin as the final arbiter of truth on Plato. She was his last and best hope.

He climbed the stairs to Paulina Valentin’s office on the third floor. Jonathan had taken Valentin’s Plato seminar his senior year but had been too preoccupied to take much away from it. Known for her eccentricity, she was prone to speaking in riddles, hinting that she knew the truth but wanted students to discover it on their own. She seemed to dangle her wisdom just out of reach. This aloofness kept them from developing the the type of collegial relationship he enjoyed with Henkel and Marsh.

Valentin was department chair, and her office was in a prime location overlooking the quad through a large semi-circular window. There were antique armchairs and a marble bust of Aristotle sitting in judgment from his corner. The office had the quiet grandeur of an inner sanctum. Valentin sat in a high-backed leather chair behind a large hardwood desk and wore a pair of severe black-rimmed reading glasses, which she removed when she saw Jonathan silhouetted in the doorway.

After he greeted her, she motioned him in. He sank into one of the creaky armchairs.

“I got your note,” she said. Her faint French accent exuded a Continental mysteriousness. “It’s good to hear you’re thinking about graduate studies and taking an interest in Plato.”

“Yes, I’ve always wanted to pursue my PhD. The timing wasn’t right before, but I’m very serious about it now. I hear you’re the person I need to talk to for insight on Plato.”

“Always beware of professors bearing gifts,” she said.

“Did you get the draft of my writing sample?”

“Yes, I made a copy,” she looked down at the pages in front of her and frowned. “There are some interesting ideas here, but this is just…” she trailed off snd didn’t finish her sentence.

“What?”

“I think the problem is that you’re trying to do too much here. You want to fly before you walk. You need to walk first and then you can fly.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Let me give you some advice from serving on graduate admissions committees. Your thesis doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. It doesn’t have to be your best work. The writing sample is a display of philosophical muscle,” she said. “It’s less about your conclusions than demonstrating your  command of the methods and concepts of philosophy and your ability to construct a cogent argument. Here, I have something that will help.”

She went to a shelf on the wall and took a print out from a large stack of copies and handed it to him. “I give this to all my students,” she said. “It’s a very useful guide.”

Jonathan stared at the stapled print out of about five double-sided pages, entitled “Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper”. It was a popular piece written by a Harvard professor, which he had read many times before. “A philosophy paper consists of the reasoned defense of some claim,” the essay began. It went on to list various things that a paper can aim to accomplish: defend the claim under consideration, criticize the claim and show why certain arguments for it fail, consider the pros and cons of two opposing views about the claim, et cetera. It was a helpful piece for novices, but didn’t go beyond basic essay form or address any of his substantive questions.

“Thanks for this,” he said, lowering the paper to his lap. “I was hoping we could talk more about the passage and work through some of the things that are troubling me. I’ve been working on this for a long time and have only made myself more confused.”

“Sure,” she said, “I have a few minutes before my class.”

He recounted for her, as he had for Henkel and Marsh, his line of thinking about Diotima and the ladder of love. Her eyes shifted distractedly about the room as he spoke.

“I agree that the goal of the ascent is to give birth through contemplation of the Beautiful itself, but I don’t think you’ve grasped what Plato means by the being of the Beautiful. You should work through the arguments Socrates makes about the forms in the Parmenides, and then you’ll discover the real surprise.”

“What surprise?”

“I can’t tell you. You’ll have to work through it on your own. I’ll just say that there is no becoming without being, but becoming can’t be explained by being alone. We know the eidei through logos, but giving an account of physis requires an eikos muthos or ‘likely story’. You should read Alexander Nehemas and Gail Fine on the forms. Their commentary is very instructive.” Jonathan had an inkling of what Valentin was talking about but couldn’t figure out the relevance to his thesis.

“Here’s what I suggest: forgot about this,” she tapped the copy in front her. “For now, concentrate on answering some basic questions: First, what is the ladder of love that Diotima describes? Second, why is it introduced in the dialogue? And third, are we better off or worse off with it? Do that as soon as possible, and then we can talk again.”

Leaving the sanctum of Valentin’s office, Jonathan felt dizzy. He had come looking for answers but found only more questions. He had hoped for a midwife to help him deliver his long-labored ideas into the world but had been told to abort them in utero. The worst part was that Valentin, cryptic as she was, was right about his essay: the output of his agonized labor was a hopeless jumble. Slouching back down the stairs, he realized that he was back at square one.

* * *

Allison met him in front of the philosophy building half an hour later, where he sat on a bench finishing a cigarette. “How were your meetings?” she asked.

“Okay, I guess” he said. “You were right. It was a good idea come here.” He wasn’t prepared to admit defeat to her.

He gave her a tour of the campus, pointing out his freshman dorm, the science building where he had worked part-time in the physics lab and the sprawling field where they had laid down blankets and watch the Leonids meteor shower on freezing November nights. Ghosts of the past echoed faintly in the stone structures. After lunch at the dining hall, they checked out of their cabin and started the five-hour drive back to the city. The day had become overcast, and the leaves glowed dimly against the milky sky. As they headed south out of town, he watched the steeple on the hill shrink out of sight in his rearview mirror.

They were silent for most of the ride back and listened to music and a few talks shows on NPR. As they were driving along the Palisades, Allison suddenly reach over and turned down the radio. “So, I need to ask you something. What are you looking for in a relationship?”

The question caught him off guard. He looked over and saw her backlit in the slanting gray light, her face dark with her strawberry blonde hair glowing around the edges. “I don’t know. Someone who inspires me, I guess. Someone who makes me want to become a better person.”

She cocked her head to one side. “And do you think I do that for you?”

“Sure, I’m inspired by all your accomplishments and by the way you think. To be honest, it’s a little intimidating. What about you?”

“Well, I want the same thing. Someone who challenges me intellectually and emotionally. Someone strong who knows what they want and how to get it.”

“So where are you going with this?”

“I don’t know. Honestly, I’m worried about you. The smoking, the not sleeping, the obsessing over the paper. I think don’t think you’re in a great place.”

“I know I’ve been stressed out, but this is only temporary until I get my applications done.”

She was silent for a minute. “There’s something else I should tell you. I’m having dinner with my ex next week.”

“The Dartmouth professor?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you hated each other.”

“We had our differences, but I really like the way he puts words together. He’s such a brilliant writer. I used to really crave brilliance, almost like a drug. I guess I still do. And someone once told me that we would have really beautiful children together.”

“If you felt this way, why did you take this trip with me?”

“I always wanted to take a trip like this with you. I guess it was the last thing that I always pictured us doing together”

“So that’s it? You don’t want to see each other anymore?”

“It’s probably better if we don’t.”

“Fine. I understand, but tell me one thing. Did you even love me?”

She closed her eyes and bowed her head. Tears glistened at the corners of her eyelids, and she looked away out the passenger window.

The sun had dipped below the horizon, and he could see the lights of Manhattan glittering in the distance. They didn’t speak for the rest of the trip. When they arrived at his apartment in Queens, he parked his car on the street and both of them got out. Her car was parked across the street. They embraced awkwardly, and then she got into her car and drove away. He watched the red tail lights of her car disappear around the corner.

That night, Jonathan sat in a folding chair by the window and brooded. He puffed on a cigarette and watched the smoke curl out the window and dissipate in the crisp air. A siren wailed in the distance and grew louder as an ambulance passed under his window and momentarily bathed the street in pulsating red light. The serenity of the mountains from that afternoon already seemed a distant memory.

If only he could find the right combination words, he could finally resolve all his personal and intellectual troubles.  Love, death, beauty, wholeness were all pieces of some grand jigsaw puzzle. If only he could climb one step higher, he could see how they all fit together.

Suddenly, he was struck by a flash of insight. He finally had it! He ran feverishly to his laptop, ready to capture his epiphany before it flitted away. His fingers trembled above the keys as he stared into the glowing screen, preparing to open the floodgates. He held this pose for several minutes and then slowly closed the laptop and got up from his chair.

He went to the book shelf and stared at his books. He looked at the embossed binding of a Schopenhauer volume and ran his finger along its spine. He pulled it down off the shelf and turned it over in his hands. Then he went to the closet and got an old moving box. He put the box in front of the book shelf and threw the book inside. Then he went to the shelf and got down another three books. Soon he was grabbing armfuls of books off the shelf and packing them away.

He filled one box, then two, then three with every book he had collected over the years. Goodbye, Plato. Goodbye, Hume. Goodbye, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Goodbye, my friends. I loved you but was not worthy of you. Goodbye honors, degrees and classrooms. Goodbye eager students and brilliant professors. He heaved the boxes, one by one, back into the closet and slammed the door with both hands. Exhausted, he flopped down on his bed and fell into a deep sleep.

Jonathan dreamt that he was flying above the town of Waterloo with the red maple tree-lined streets and rooftops below. He soared higher and higher, and the ground shrank beneath him. Houses faded away into a grid of streets; streets faded into forests and mountains; mountains into a jagged coastline; coasts into vast continents. His body rose higher toward the sun and finally into space as the earth shrank to an iridescent marble. He floated in the blackest blackness and felt his body harden into a sheath of ice, which began falling back to earth.

He plummeted faster and faster through the atmosphere, his lungs breathless and his limbs paralyzed by the icy shell. The ground came rushing toward him in fast forward, and a feeling of terror and resignation gripped him. Just as he fell below the clouds, the ice that encased him started to crack. The crack moved slowly from his toes up to his head, until the ice suddenly shattered into a million pieces like a cloud of diamonds. He emerged from the chrysalis with wings of fire that bore him aloft into the sun and beyond the reach of Earth’s gravity.

Jonathan woke up at 6 a.m. the next day and dressed for work. He put on a pair of black shoes, gray slacks and a blue dress shirt. A black belt encircled his waist, and his collar stood firm around his neck. He laced up his shoes and grabbed his keys from the dresser. Stepping outside into the chilly air, he slammed the door behind him and rubbed his cold hands together. He marched four blocks to the subway like a soldier going off to war.

At the subway station, he walked down the stairs into the stifling air of the tunnel below. Under the buzzing lights, Jonathan waited next to other people outfitted in their work armor. He stood at the edge of the platform atop the yellow warning strip. Looking down onto the tracks, he saw dead leaves scattered among crumpled papers, cups and forks, the detritus of the daily commute.

Tears filled his eyes as he gazed into the darkness. There was a deep rumble of the F train approaching the station and he heard the high screech of the wheels on the tracks and saw the train’s headlights, kaleidoscopic in his watery eyes, coming to ferry him across the river. His heart sank as he mourned for a future that would never arrive, resting like a broken statue of Aphrodite at the bottom of a silent sea.