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

Eureka! I was outside the camp wandering, really, uninitiated into what they called “The Great Conversation”, before discovering the Great Books, when I heard a murmur, a rustling,...leaves of a page, 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 through the gates: it was a long and meandering walk like the leisurely path 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, by the banks of the Ilissus River. We sat under a shaded tree whose shadows danced to the perfect forms bathed in the sun of virtue. Herman Melville introduced himself next, from a weathered mahogany pulpit, 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 against a linseed-oiled sail. Was this the Golden Thread?

Further down the road, Dante appeared as if holding the lantern to Antiquity, opening the drawbridge to Aristotle, Virgil and Homer illuminating my descent like Orpheus and his Lyre into 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 that have shaped the Western mind; our DNA. I shall call them the three strangers though not strange at all, I found kinship in their writing, discourses and a shared passion for knowledge and φιλοσοφία—love of wisdom. It was an invitation to the ancient virtue of Friendship.

There were others along the way, Descartes the most intimate encounter, drew me in immediately between the duality of his pensées; a body in search of a mind. His proofs of God's existence from his Meditations, were vulnerable and hospitable with his line of thinking and from his Discourse on Method, I rose from my slumber and 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 first few notes plucked by Saint Augustine a thousand years before "Si fallor, sum” (If I am deceived, I am). Finally, Shakespeare, a constant companion and a sober Bacchus, played the fool, while we imbibed in all things human, "If music be the food of love, play on!“, he was the Compass Rose to the Muses. Had I found the Golden Thread?

Our Culture is not handed to us, we are responsible to rediscover it as our ancestors did who searched for it as a Holy Grail. Here we return to the concept of the One and the Many: It is the lasting legacy of the Individual of the West, the Arthurian quest to transcend the tribe (the many), often by spilling his blood, but that individual outlasts the collective in memory and eloquence walking through the gauntlet so that great souls may not only follow but exceed. By this truth, I put on the Golden Thread and leave the Gate open for the next passer-by: And if any of you should travel to a far away land, or find yourself wandering 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 intact and it is brilliant in your mind, 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.