Friday, August 24, 2012

Theseus in Google maps

I ate a little piece of chocolate this afternoon and I am holding now with my fingers the small red strip of wrapping paper. There is a little drawing of the ruins of the temple of Poseidon in Sounio, "the most meridian point in Attica".  From up there, up these walls, Theseus' father jumped down the cliffs in terrible agony and killed himself, for he thought his son had perished in the fight against the Minotaur of Crete. E. told me the story today. But Aegeas was mistaken, since his son had been successful over the beast. Only that Theseus had forgotten to pull out the white sails of the battle ship -as it was the agreed signal- when returning victorious from the island. O, sons! What a mess. What an universal mess! The tiny body of the old man, lost in the vast ocean... The magnitude of the tragedy was made justice by re-baptizing -let us use this word at this time- the privileged sea around: Aegeus.

On the other side, the Minotaur, a beast caged in a labyrinth, with horns and all, was one of the many sons of the king Minos of Crete. The pretty Ariadna -one can only imagine her pretty- was also Mino's daughter. Nature is capricious. The relationship between father and son is stated with tons of wisdom and experience by Montaigne, precisely, in the first line of his essay On the Education of Children: "I have never known a father refuse to acknowledge his son however scabby or deformed the boy may be".

A nice story of fathers and sons, no doubt. The next chapter could be written today by any father with any son and the little help of Google maps. How easy it is now! Zooming in and out the narrow strait of sea from the continent to Crete, one can almost feel the fear of the warrior inside those egg-shells, sailing at the mercy of inconstant winds and voluble gods; one can almost see the dark silhouette of the menacing island and hear in the distance, like in the old King-Kong movie, the tam-tams calling upon the horrible creature to soothe its hunger and placate its fury.

Everything makes sense.

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