Where Three Roads Meet by Barth John

Author:Barth, John [Barth, John]
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2010-04-26T20:00:00+00:00

11

— Doctor?

— I must have dropped off. What were we talking of?

— The sphinx, among other things.

— Ah yes. You were saying she impeded speech, rather like my own “monster”!

— And the capacity to think. My thoughts often return to the befuddling creature. The man who took Laios’s place with his wife in his bed, as reward for solving the meaning of the sphinx’s conundrum, never solved the deeper riddle.

— Oh, there’s always another story!

— You see, Doctor, he was too ready with answers. The answer to the riddle, which he gave us all so breezily, was “man”, but he never considered how the title applied to him. Know thyself. Then know that you are a human being, a member of the species of mankind. So know first and foremost that you do not know, and what you claim to know is almost certainly a means of distracting yourself from what you really know.

— Which ten to one you will choose not to know. Repression is a means of staying alive. Until it stifles us, of course.

— Repression or diversion, Doctor? There is more than one way to skin a cat. The joke is that my own longing was to unknow. I knew what it was like to “know” and it had worn me to a ravelling. Take it from me, the unexamined life is well worth living.

— I would take issue with that.

— Ah yes, Dr Freud. But Nothing in excess. That was the other Delphic motto. Or to put it in other words, don’t try to know too much. The oracle named Socrates the wisest of men because “he knew that he didn’t know”. In any case, I – or whatever it was in me that might have taken note – did nothing; let them stew in their own juice. Gave them time.

— Time is often the best thing you can give anyone. I could wish to have a little more of it myself.

— You have given me your precious time, Doctor, and I am grateful.

— My dear man, it is the greatest pleasure. You pass the time most agreeably.

— Agreeably or not, time passes. And if I chose not to see what was before my sightless eyes, during the years between the swaggering Corinthian’s arrival in Thebes and the advent of the troubles, it was because my own motto was: Let well alone. When all was said and done, what business was it of mine? They were happy, Oedipus and Jocasta. It was a good match, he full of buck and bustle and the queen with the reins of the city at last in her hands. And the poor creature must have been relieved to be rid of that old brute, her first husband, who never cared for women in the first place. And her virile young second husband looked up to her, for which she must have given thanks.

— Remind me of the age gap?

— Not so much that it mattered: sixteen years, and she a handsome woman.

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