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How a Few Days Sailing in the Aegean Changed My Mind About the Fundamental Nature of Things | How a Few Days Sailing in the Aegean Changed My Mind About the Fundamental Nature of Things |
(5 days later) | |
A few years ago, my wife, Sarah, and I went on a sailing trip on the eastern Aegean. It was heaven: the two of us out at sea, charting a course between Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, taking turns helming the boat and dozing below, surrounded by all the glittering blue of the sea. | A few years ago, my wife, Sarah, and I went on a sailing trip on the eastern Aegean. It was heaven: the two of us out at sea, charting a course between Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, taking turns helming the boat and dozing below, surrounded by all the glittering blue of the sea. |
As we hopped from port to port, I couldn’t help but notice that the names of many of the places we passed were familiar to me, as I had come across them in my work as a historian. Thirty or forty miles to the south of our boat was Miletus, the birthplace of some of the first recorded theorists of the physical world. Twenty miles to the east in Ephesus was the home of Heraclitus, the earliest person whose reflections on the interrelatedness of things have come down to us. Across a nearby peninsula, just 70 miles away, was Lesbos, the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest early lyric poets. To the south in Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras, an early theorist of an everlasting soul. | As we hopped from port to port, I couldn’t help but notice that the names of many of the places we passed were familiar to me, as I had come across them in my work as a historian. Thirty or forty miles to the south of our boat was Miletus, the birthplace of some of the first recorded theorists of the physical world. Twenty miles to the east in Ephesus was the home of Heraclitus, the earliest person whose reflections on the interrelatedness of things have come down to us. Across a nearby peninsula, just 70 miles away, was Lesbos, the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest early lyric poets. To the south in Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras, an early theorist of an everlasting soul. |
It struck me that not so far out of view from the cockpit of our small boat was the whole province in which Greek philosophy had begun. Those gray-blue masses of island and mainland hid within them the thinkers’ cities. | It struck me that not so far out of view from the cockpit of our small boat was the whole province in which Greek philosophy had begun. Those gray-blue masses of island and mainland hid within them the thinkers’ cities. |
There, afloat on the water, I began wondering about the relationship of places and ideas — how places can open up the way we think and feel and give access to minds, however distant and strange. I realized then that philosophy has a geography. To be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise, and despite that locatedness and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today. | There, afloat on the water, I began wondering about the relationship of places and ideas — how places can open up the way we think and feel and give access to minds, however distant and strange. I realized then that philosophy has a geography. To be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise, and despite that locatedness and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today. |