Sketches

I am fortunate my watchmaker operates near a university because when I visit him there is a good chance I meet a professor. That is what happened to me recently when I went to him to complain that the watch strap he had sold me three days earlier for an exorbitant price had disintegrated.

He was suitably apologeti, blamed it on the Chinese for having made it and promptly gave me a better one, which so far has proven solid. It was made in Montreal.

I liked my watchmaker’s accent.

“Are you Hungarian?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “Greek.”

The man who stood beside me made a noise.

“Greek,” the watchmaker repeated. “My name is Socrates.”

I could not believe my ears. Thirty years ago I met a man called Aristotle on the Greek island of Samos but this was my first Socrates.

“Socrates,” he repeated. “Like the old bull-shitter.”

The man next to me turned out to be a professor of philosophy who believed in the Socratic method.

“Do you have any reason for calling him that?” he asked benevolently. “Other than to shock your customers?”

“Of course. I am tired of being lectured about him and his nagging wife Xantippe.”

“I can understand that,” the professor nodded. “People probably expect you to spout wisdom and behave like a saint, just because of your name.”

“They know better,” the watchmaker laughed.

“Does the name run in the family?” I asked

“No, I am the first.”

“You should be proud of it,” the professor said. “The old man,” – he could not bring himself to say “the old bull-shitter” – “is highly relevant to our situation today. He lived at a similar time. Do you read the papers?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What will you do when there are no more papers?” the professor continued his Socratic dialogue.

“I suppose I’ll have to go online like everybody else.”

“But obviously you prefer the papers. When your namesake was beginning to make a name for himself – yes, your name – he faced a similar situation to ours. Up to then people relied on the oral tradition, on word of mouth. They heard Homer, they did not read him. Because they couldn’t. There was no alphabet. That was introduced around the time the old man opened his practice. And he was puzzled by it and resisted it.”

“I guess that is why he did not publish anything,” the watchmaker observed.

“Exactly,” the professor beamed. “He didn’t because he couldn’t. He had to wait for Plato to immortalize him. He resisted the alphabet just as today so many of us resist the cyberworld. He did not see any advantage in the written word over word of mouth. Being wise and saintly does not mean being able to look into the future. He had no idea the oral tradition was on the way out and the alphabet on the way in, to stay around for a least two and a half millennia.

“You just can’t have everything,” Socrates observed wisely.