The Secret History - Donna Tartt [16]
Bunny launched into the story about the Montblanc pen. Uneasily, I edged into the corner and began to examine the books in the bookcase.
“How long have you studied the classics?” said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry, who had turned in his chair to look at me.
“Two years,” I said.
“What have you read in Greek?”
“The New Testament.”
“Well, of course you’ve read Koine,” he said crossly. “What else? Homer, surely. And the lyric poets.”
This, I knew, was Henry’s special bailiwick. I was afraid to lie. “A little.”
“And Plato?”
“Yes.”
“All of Plato?”
“Some of Plato.”
“But all of it in translation.”
I hesitated, a moment too long. He looked at me, incredulous. “No?”
I dug my hands into the pockets of my new overcoat. “Most of it,” I said, which was far from true.
“Most of what? The dialogues, you mean? What about later things? Plotinus?”
“Yes,” I lied. I have never, to this day, read a word by Plotinus.
“What?”
Unfortunately my mind went blank, and I could not think of a single thing I knew for sure Plotinus had written. The Eclogues? No, dammit, that was Virgil. “Actually, I don’t much care for Plotinus,” I said.
“No? Why is that?”
He was like a policeman with the questions. Wistfully, I thought of my old class, the one I’d dropped for this one: Intro to Drama, with jolly Mr. Lanin, who made us lie on the floor and do relaxation exercises while he walked around and said things like: “Now imagine that your body is filling with a cool orange fluid.”
I had not answered the Plotinus question soon enough for Henry’s taste. He said something rapidly in Latin.
“I beg your pardon?”
He looked at me coldly. “Never mind,” he said, and bent back over his book.
To hide my consternation, I turned to the bookshelf.
“Happy now?” I heard Bunny say. “I guess you raked him over the coals pretty good, eh?”
To my intense relief, Charles came over to say hello. He was friendly and quite calm, but we had scarcely more than exchanged greetings when the door opened and a hush fell as Julian slipped in and closed the door quietly behind him.
“Good morning,” he said. “You’ve met our new student?”
“Yes,” said Francis in what I thought a bored tone, as he held out Camilla’s chair and then slid into his own.
“Wonderful. Charles, would you put on water for tea?”
Charles went into a little anteroom, no bigger than a closet, and I heard the sound of running water. (I never did know exactly what was in that anteroom or how Julian, upon occasion, was miraculously able to convey four-course meals out of it.) Then he came out, closing the door behind him, and sat down.
“All right,” said Julian, looking around the table. “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?”
He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one—especially after so many years—without losing a good deal in the translation. The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato’s four divine madnesses, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place.
“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?” he said, looking round the table. “Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls—which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn’t it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think? Remember the Erinyes?