Metapontum
You spent that summer on a cruise around the Ionian Sea. Magna Graecia, as the brochures dubbed it. Nobody on the ship had any interest in mathematics or philosophy, but it was the event of the season and you got pulled along like a twig in the current. Pythagoras’s school! Hippasus’s birthplace! Exquisite pasta! Reality was more concrete than the ads. It was dry and dusty on the land, turquoise and salty on the water.
The cruise director had been ordered by his superiors to take university courses over the winter so that he could field questions from erudite guests. One morning, after exhausting the topic of the century, he gave a lecture on logic. We all know modus ponens, he said, though perhaps not by that name:
p
p ⇒ q
q
Yet there’s a leap between 2 and 3, he said, isn’t there? One can accept 1 and 2 and still grouse about where one gets taken next. It’s like Euclid’s fifth postulate. Why should we believe it? Now that other ancient wisdoms have been disproven, what else might we challenge? What ideas that we presumed were true might be false? What so-called falsities might be true?
These questions provided a segue, somehow, for upselling customers on a breakfast of local dorado. He stood in front of a banner that read The End of Irrationality and pointed at a prize fillet. I’ll take two, you said, and scuttled up to his side. Although he must have been well over 60, he wore a navy blazer with brassy epaulets that turned him into a little boy — into your first crush, Robin, who, decades ago, had memorized a banner with the digits of π that wrapped around the walls of your classroom.
There is a straight line from ancient history to now, the cruise director said, more to the table than to you. We’ll soon leave Metapontum. Then it’s on to Croton. The dorado is good, you whispered, but he was already getting to his feet.
Between Robin and this cruise, there had been only one relationship — a marriage, no less, but it had barely lasted a year. He had moved west for a job, for a change, for a pretense, and you had damped your desires under a perennial blanket of snow, saving up for a continental vacation once every five years. Walk slowly, said the needlepoint on your couch cushions, smile often, find the golden thread in life.
Breakfast was ending. Can we talk for a moment? you asked the cruise director, as the land slipped out of view. I liked what you said about wisdom and how things that were false can be true and vice versa. For the hundredth time, you checked that his broad Devonshire finger had no wedding band. If we all thought some number would never end and then it did, you continued, doesn’t that mean that maybe something I thought was over for me might not be? Can you imagine —
But he could already see where you were going. His eyebrows minced apologetically. Humiliation hit you like a twenty-foot wave. You rushed onto the deck with a sob, praying that this interminable cruise would end. All you could see was open water.