The Golden Thread of Ideas (an Introduction to the Great Conversation)

Eureka! I was outside the camp, really, uninitiated into what they called "The Great Conversation” before I discovered the “Great Books”. It was then that I heard a rustling of leaves, the turning of pages--the voice of Adam:

”Call me Ishmael! “, another voice “there was ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three”... “by the rosy-fingered dawn” answered Homer, and another, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye”,  a little Prince with Golden hair turned to me in passing—a familiar face.

Curiosity led me to pass through the gates: the journey was long and meandering like the leisurely pace of Socrates on his way back from the Port of Piraeus, running into his friends. The first fellow traveler that I encountered was Plato, who drew me into the light of reason for a Dialogue or two, along the banks of the Ilissus River; there we sat beneath a shaded tree whose shadows danced in rhythm with the Perfect Forms bathed in the sunlight of virtue. Herman Melville introduced himself next, from a mahogany pulpit weathered from the passage of time, he taught me that words are vessels in a vast and unbridled sea lapping up against the corpus of an infamous whale: the formidable Western Canon. Melville's painterly style, a master and commander of metaphor, impressed upon me with words like a generous palette knife icing the surface of a linseed-oiled sail. Was this not the Golden Thread?

Further down the road, Dante appeared much like a lantern-bearer of Antiquity--lowering the drawbridge, he opened a path for me to Aristotle, Virgil, and Homer, and lit my descent (like Orpheus, lyre in hand) into the very heart of the Divine Comedy. On that journey from Purgatory to Inferno to Paradiso, he handed me a map of our intellectual lineage, a chronology (κρόνος) of thinkers who have shaped Western thought--our spiritual DNA. I shall call them the three strangers though they were by no means strangers to me; within their writing and discourses I discovered a kinship of souls and a shared passion for knowledge and φιλοσοφία—love of wisdom. It was an invitation to partake in the ancient virtue: Friendship.

There were others along the way, among them Descartes proved to be the most intimate encounter, he drew me in immediately to the duality of his pensées; a body in search of reason. His proofs of God's existence from his Meditations, were vulnerable and permeable to his own reasoning, his Discourse on Method, roused me from my slumber and I was rendered conscious of thinking itself. We all know that famous symphony : Cogito ergo sum or ( I am thinking, therefore I must exist), resonating those opening notes plucked by Saint Augustine a thousand years before "Si fallor, sum” (If I am deceived, I am). Finally, Shakespeare, a constant companion and sober Bacchus, played the fool, while we reveled in all that makes us human, "If music be the food of love, play on!“, he was the Compass Rose charting the way to the Muses. Had I found the Golden Thread?

Culture is not handed to us ready-made, it is our responsibility to rediscover it just as our ancestors did and sought after it like a Holy Grail. Here we return to the concept of the One and the Many: such is the lasting legacy of the Western Individual--the Arthurian quest to transcend the tribe (the Many), often at the cost of one's own blood. Yet this individual outlives the collective in memory and eloquence walking through the gauntlet so that great souls may not only follow but exceed. By this truth, I take hold of the Golden Thread and leave the Gate open for the next passer-by: And if any of you should venture to distant lands, or lose yourself in the garden of ideas, and if you should stumble on to this passage, please do not hurry: read it slowly, with attention and tenderness , 'your mind ajar'. Close your eyes, if you hear a murmur, a rustling…leaves of a page, remember the Golden Thread. If you see it whole and unbroken in your mind, shining with brilliance like a perfect form, please comfort me by telling your children about it, that they might use it as Theseus did, to find their path out of the labyrinth and be counted among the stars.