The Unexamined Life
For Professor Socrates, progress through academic life had been smooth and rewarding. He had graduated effortlessly through the necessary qualifications, conducted widely cited research, published with distinction and, where favourable, with shrewdly selected co-authors. He now occupies a Chair in Philosophy at a renowned institution. His views are sought-after and pored-over. In seminars, the slightest clearing of his throat brings silence and wide-eyed expectation, his crisp words plundered for their precious meaning and significance. His syllable-per-sentence ratio (SPSR), the universal measure of academic prowess, is unsurpassed. Doyenhood becomes him.
Now, for his latest accolade, it has been announced that he will deliver a guest lecture at a renowned European city university. He has travelled extravagantly, with all expenses paid by a reverential alumnus of the institute. He is well fed and delighted with his new over-priced Italian leather shoes. The professor’s flawless presentation on the topic for which he is most celebrated, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’ is polished and ready, he has slept luxuriously in a constellated hotel, and he wakes feeling imperious.
Unfortunately, having made his way across rich carpeting to the spacious marbled bathroom, Professor Socrates struggles to operate the shower mechanism, which is contemporary-sleek and supremely disguised, described by the manufacturers as ‘intuitive’ and ‘hyper-responsive.’ The professor is unable to persuade the shower to deliver more than a trickle of tepid water. At both basins, hot water gushes instantly, so a man of his intelligence has to acknowledge that it is a problem most probably not of supply but of the user interface. He feels indescribably stupid. The tepid water and his quivering nakedness combine to infuse in him, perhaps for the first time in his life, an insight into what it is like to not understand something.
With a blend of embarrassment and ire, Professor Socrates calls Reception. With a blend of harassment and irony, Reception calls Eliany the cleaner, who happens to be in the corridor about to direct her refreshing talents to the vacated Room 109. She taps modestly at the next door along and is admitted with a sullen grunt by the be-gowned professor. How can I help?
Eliany had left school at the age of 14 without a command of reading and writing. She could carry out all sorts of practical calculations in her head regarding shortage or surplus of soap, shampoo and towels, and could calculate with unfailing accuracy the cost of any mini-bar consumption from its depletion, on her rounds. Her organisational skills, when it came to children’s parties or getting them fed and ready for school and bed, were formidable. Eliany worked the hotel in the morning and the hospital in the evening—generally without daylight and often subjected to the crass rudeness of the inmates—to keep her kids fed and shod. She seldom occupied a chair: the arthritis in her knees was a searing, oscillating agony, about which she would not remark. The footprint of her apartment is about the same as the aforementioned en suite. She doesn’t have the time or capacity to examine her life or anyone else’s, nor to ponder, let alone expound upon, the philosophical nuances of the word ‘worth.’
Eliany shows the lame-brained prof how to touch the device to activate the shower. She smiles innocently in her knowing, he nods knowingly in his ignorance, she retreats, and the door closes by itself behind her, as they always do.
~