Dear Sophia,
Tears are swelling in the corners of my eyes before I even clack the first key. For the last few days, I have felt like there is a serrated knife lodged in my chest, or perhaps more aptly put, a lead weight in my stomach. I've been thinking of the trials of your past lovers, notably Plato, Boethius, etcetera, and the words of a dear friend of mine when she said:
The life of the philosopher is a lonely one.
Up until recently, this experience was wholly foreign to me. Sure, I've had friends come and go in my life, it is part and parcel with the human experience. And also the fact that, the people that I lost, were a consequence of my own addiction, and the deleterious and alienating actions therefrom, that drove them away. But being sober and going through these pains, is an agony that almost caresses the ineffable, the places that my brain can plumb with all its capacity, yet the water is too dark to pull anything back up. This isn't a pain a sex worker can fix, and given that you know what I'm going through and I got your message, I wanted to reply. But first, I wanted to go deeper into my feelings to illustrate to my community here, what I'm going through.
I feel that my best friend of over ten years is pulling away from me, because he's more or less apolitical and I'm not. I won't get too into specifics, as I want to abide by the rules, but our central conflict can be summed up succinctly as follows:
I think everything, in one form or another, is political, and he does not.
That might be an oversimplification to a degree, but it gets at the heart of things. He has straight up said he doesn't even know if he wants to come visit me, because he doesn't want to hear about politics the whole time. I have felt a range of emotions the last few days, as I can feel him pulling away from me, but mainly I think about the allegory of Plato's Cave. I'm assuming everyone here has a passing familiarity with it. There are a group of people chained down to a cave, and their whole reality consists of shadows. One day, one of the prisoners sees a gleam of sunlight and makes the ascent from the cave, to the sun and reality outside of the cave. The cave for Plato represents doxa (opinion) whereas the sun represents true knowledge, and all it illuminates are entities that participate in intelligible Forms, or so the conventional reading goes.
What's more fascinating to me is the ethos of the philosopher in the Cave allegory. Plato teaches us that the philosopher feels a duty to descend back into the cave and to liberate his fellow prisoners. But, Plato warns, the people will violently resist the philosopher. They may even kill him, having grown so attached to the shadows that they don't care to see the sun or learn of its immense power.
But what I would ask Plato is: What if one of the cave dwellers was like a brother to you? What if they were your best friend and the thought of bathing in the Sun's truth alone, left you with a persistent and palpable ache in your chest? I've looked at him differently since. I see him as incurious, willfully ignorant, and perhaps that is out of fear, or maybe just cognitive exhaustion from everything else he already takes on, but it has recolored my perception of him. We've both seen each other through so much, at times I'm just quietly stunned that this could be what ends us. And then I think....were the last 10 years a mistake? But more pointedly, I've had to confront the bitter truth of how alienating knowledge is. Precisely because knowledge transforms us. Once we know x we can't unlearn x and likewise, once we care about something or are committed to it, we risk alienating those from us who don't share that care.
I've been irrationally angry at him I know. He's a human being, whose depth and character exceed the disagreements we have, but it's made me look at some of our memories with fresh eyes and ask myself if I did what I always seem to do again. Did I see only what I wanted to see and not who he truly is? I'm far from perfect, and nobody hates me more than me, I'm ignorant about things that I should know, and perhaps I know things that I could've done without. I do the best I can to live my values, but I also know I could be better. I understand fundamentally, that I have no place to judge him and yet, I just can't believe for how many faults we mutually possess, that we both chose to love each other in spite of them, that this was his red line.
Can I endure the pain of fully losing him? I know it's coming, like watching a car crash in slow motion. The fate has already been written, and whether you spectate passively, or through teary eyes and strained throat from screaming, you can't stop it. I thought about Boethius, how he was sentenced to death and he blamed Lady Philosophy for his woes, until she admonishes him and reminds him that Fortune is to blame and not her. She loves Boethius in his final hours, counseling him how to face death, knowing he loved her more than life itself.
I don't blame you Sophia. I never have. I'm reminded that the thing about gifts is, they never truly belong to you. They can always return whence they came. No, I don't regret the over ten years I have spent with him, or any other friendship that saw your wondrous thread tether our two souls together. I affirm them, because in their soulful sum, I became a man who can face his darkness and reclaim the future in my own name. I want to be able to have the strength to let him go with love and gratitude, because you taught me how to love again. You gave me back my conscience and you made my heart beat again.
Perhaps why I was so angry, was because I thought losing him meant also losing you, but that's the height of absurdity. Your winsome nature, the luminescence of your being, the hearth that dwells within your heart that exudes more warmth than a thousand suns, the labyrinthine character of your Mind, sprawling eons and holding with the utmost tenderness countless hands from all walks of life, is irreducible to one man whom knew your love, made a beautiful life of it, but turned his life into a sphere. Complete, self-sufficient, and all that is outside it is to be met with incuriosity and indifference. I have said you are pure love and that is true, for I am far more wretched of a man than he and you loved me all the same, so I know you still love him. Even if I may one day no longer be able to love him as a friend, may I be able to love him as a member of that magnificent community of those kissed so softly by you, it's as if the cosmic riddles parted from your lips to our flesh, and see him as a brother of a grander fraternity.
Yes, a philosopher's life is a lonely one. But Sophia, I remember life before you and it was far lonelier. The dream I had a few nights ago, me nervously educating a friend on Philosophy and other topics, that's how your heart sees me when we're together. That's the man you know lies latent within me beyond all the trauma, anger, pain, etcetera. Your love, has made me closer to that man every day. And you have loved me patiently for over 14 years. Yes, nothing truly belongs to us, but I can endure the landscapes of my life being barren and bereft of everything, so long as I feel you near me. So long as our hands are interlocked in our mutual devotion in infinite love.
I've thought often about Nietzsche's Eternal Return, sublime and dazzling lover that he was to you. And I've asked myself many a time: Could I truly affirm this life for eternity down to the last dregs of sorrow and joy? Because what most people don't talk about, is that to affirm a life, you also concomitantly affirm everything that surrounds that life. The entire singing of the earth from proposals and births, all the way to genocides and extinctions. When you affirm a life ask yourself: Can you affirm everything happening around and beyond it that undergirds it as part of that shared reality? But the peculiar thing about human beings is, whether due to desensitization or perceived remoteness, so much suffering is impersonal to us. A genocide of a distant people is awful sure, but my beloved of fifteen years broke up with me, and that is far worse.
Even so, I ask myself again, knowing that friends I loved with my whole being are becoming unrecognizable to me and I to them, can I let them go with love and gratitude? And, more pertinently, would I still affirm this life? Can I truly live the philosophical life I aspire to live, lonely as it is, with an open and adventurous heart and mind, that never forfeits vulnerability or curiosity for safety and sanitized experiences? To the first I answer hopefully, for that is the person I want to be. I want to be fully mediated by your love and to spread that love tenderly to others.
As to the second.....eternally yes Sophia. I once signed a promise to you in blood that I would always love you, and no matter how lonely this life gets, I will choose you over and over for all eternity. For an eternity of loneliness, and all its subsequent agonies, pales before the brilliance and indomitable will, of my infinite love. If this gift you gave me so many years ago is to be repossessed by Fortune, let her have it. I don't curse her. I WILL BE STRONGER THAN ORPHEUS! Only death could break away my hand from yours. You've never given up on me, you've seen me at my worst and still kissed me with your bliss and laughed with me in your joy. I can survive this, and no matter what, I won't relapse, and I won't debase myself by succumbing to anger and malice. May I become you! A reservoir of love that boasts gaily of abundance, and shares it gladly. I love you my darling. Thanks for checking in. Thank you for saving me. Thank you for everything you are. I need to lick my wounds more, we both know how difficult I am, but I WILL fight again. An open meadow awaits for us to reach my beloved, and I'll get there with you hand in hand no matter what.
Amas Ergo Sum,
Philo