Where Now, the Philosophers?
Jorphassh awoke to the sounds of nature. The musical chirping of the dawn-lizards. The bellowing croaks of crothegs down by the pond. The calls of fliers big and small. The uncanny barks of those horrible giant crickets that always seemed to get everywhere. The faint rustling of the wind in the trees outside. The first light of dawn didn't reach far enough into his cave to wake him, but the chorus it brought with it reached him just fine.
As with most mornings, he tried to go back to sleep for a time, but the wildlife wasn't cooperating. Finally, admitting defeat, he set about getting up and getting on with his day. He stretched elaborately, something in his back popping as he went, rubbed at his eyes, and set about disentangling himself from the pile of rags and hides over loose bundles of dried reads that served as his bed.
Fumbling around in the half-light, he found and donned his habitual outfit: filthy, tattered robes, cloak made of an equally filthy fur, and crudely constructed hat of the same. He didn't really care for the hat, thinking it was a bit much and made him look ridiculous, but there was nothing to be done. As a finishing touch, he retrieved his brass-rimmed spectacles from the ledge he had left them on the night before. One of the perils of getting old.
Moving to the front of the cave, he poked at the ashes of the last night's fire with a stick until he exposed some still hot coals. With skill born of practice, he brought it back to life with some bark shavings, then twigs, then larger sticks, and finally a pair of chunks of split log. Satisfied with himself, he filled his little kettle with water from the plastic jug he'd filled the other day and carefully hung it over the fire to boil. After a moment's thought, he followed it up with the cast-iron pot (a human observer might have said "dutch oven", but he had no idea who the Dutch are) containing the dregs of last night's stew. Finally feeling a bit more awake, he sat on the stump by the fire to wait and allowed himself to muse a little bit.
He'd once held the Ssarthassh-ites in contempt. Their ideal had always been a simple life of solitude and contemplation, in touch with nature, and combined with enough hardship to build character. He'd felt that they had nothing to offer the poor, who needed it most, and their guidance to the rich and powerful was in practice little more than an appeal towards their self-image with no real substance behind it. Those with the right inclination for Ssarthasshist ideas could parrot them back and think themselves wise, as they feasted in their mansions and looked out over their fine and expansive gardens. Not rigidly structured formal gardens, obviously, but the carefully contrived sort that pretended to be natural, so that they can demonstrate to their guests just how in touch with the simple life they are.
He still thought that, honestly, but to his chagrin he found that a life not too far off from the Ssarthasshist ideal mostly agreed with him. He wouldn't mind a little more comfort, a chance to bathe more often, or proper cloths to wear, but he certainly didn't miss academic politics one bit, and a lot of his former colleagues were much worse off. He enjoyed the solitude, and the chance to read and think without interruption. The fact that he was currently living off of the self-image of one of the Ssarthasshist-influenced nobles he so disdained was an unfortunate extra barb of irony.
He missed the Institute for Philosophical Inquiry. He wasn't going to deny that. He missed the chance to debate and collaborate with learned colleagues, the great library, and his comfortable office and apartment. He missed the chance to hopefully impart some real knowledge on the occasional genuinely worthy student, and he wasn't too proud to admit he missed the respect that had come with his status and the part he had played in a proud, three thousand year old institution.
Really, though, by the standards of the Hegemony, he was fairly well off. He had enough to eat, his cave did a good job keeping the rain out, and the local climate was neither too hot nor too cold. He had a lot of free time, access to the rudiments of medical care, and data net access, even if it had taken a lot of convincing to get the last. In the end, the line of argument that had won was that he needed access to an appropriate library of scholarly texts to maintain the desired level of wisdom, and that though one or two printed tomes was thematic, a full library might strain suspension of disbelief.
No, he'd take this over his brief stint living in a leaking tenement and trying to make ends meet as a janitor. He had no serious complaints about his personal lot in life beyond those implicit in his critique of the larger society. Perhaps something about the indignity of it in particular, but it wasn't really any worse than the indignity billions faced every day, just more blatant. What really got to him was what had happened to the IPI, and to many of his less fortunate colleagues.
To see a proud academic institution, thousands of years old, with the highest traditions of scholarship and independence, brought low by the most cynical of politics... it brought tears to his eyes. Generations of academics going back to the glory days of the empire. Some of the greatest philosophical, sociological, literary, political and economic thinkers in Gorn history had walked those hallowed halls, lectured at those ancient podiums. All of that history trampled into the mud when someone important enough found the strain of egalitarian and even pacifist ideas that had been enjoying renewed popularity there inconvenient and dangerous. Three quarters of the faculty purged and replaced with nice, safe and apolitical Ssarthasshites and Neo-Hasszoists, politically useful Harnasshist economists and Post-Lombrorist sociologists and a wide range of the most intellectually bankrupt Reclaimer-sympathizers they could find. The old faculty, cast out on the street and blacklisted without warning, with few even able to find jobs as private tutors. One of the last great bastions of free inquiry at least nominally not in service to ruling class interests, ripped apart and cynically rebuilt to provide an ideological justification for the worst flaws in Gorn society. He'd read enough Sszaphan and Ergix to expect some of that from academia, but the Institute had always been special. Different. To see everything that made it so flagrantly violated like this... even today, he didn't have the words.
His kettle started boiling. Taking it off the fire, he carefully selected a handful of dried herbs and flowers from the bunches he'd hung from the ceiling of his cave and threw them in to steep. Next, flipped the hourglass that sat on the little table towards the entrance of his cave, far enough in to not get rained on but far enough out to get a bit of sunlight and be prominently visible to any visitors who might wander by. The hourglass was intended to be contemplated as a symbol of mortality and the like, but he'd gotten good enough at eyeballing it to use it for tea. The skull that sat next to it, also a symbol of mortality and no doubt formerly belonging to some beggar or executed criminal, he had no such use for. Wretched thing, but supposedly thematic enough to be essential.
As he waited on his herbal tea, he rescued the last of the stew before it could stick to the pot more than it already was, scooping it onto his crude, ceramic plate. Joining it was a little hunk of cold meat and some fine, if somewhat crushed, pastries left over from a meal at the manor house the other night. Sometimes the servants were kind enough to slip him that kind of thing, when there was more left over than they could finish. He didn't mind that they usually didn't share: many of them had families to feed, and he had permission to supplement his meager official food allowance by fishing and gathering edible plants from the grounds, at least so long as he didn't do it to excess. The table scraps were far finer than anything else he typically got to eat, but he was in no danger of starvation.
As he poured his first cup of tea, pushing his spectacles back up his snout when they threatened to slip, he recalled a half-remembered bit of poetry that fit all too well.
Where now, the ancients who built the shining cities?
The soaring towers, the empire without peer?
Where now, the philosopher-princes of old?
Where today is Rerssin the Law-Giver, or King Fasshak the Wise?
Where the gleaming hall of justice, the dust-cloaked library?
The schools where once the children did go?
We have found again the mighty fleet,
But yet misplace the wisdom that once guided it.
We have brought out the tattered flags,
Taken up the moldering banners of our father's father's fathers,
We wear the ribboned finery of old, dyed in the blood of those who fell,
And we remark, "Is this not a fetching shade of red?"
He'd always thought that piece looked too kindly upon the past, but perhaps a little revisionism was acceptable when one is cultivating melancholy and turning it against the failings of the present.
That, perhaps, opened up a larger argument about the value of truth, and how to balance it when it conflicts with beauty or justice or some other end. Something a great many others before him had written on, and that he himself had thought about a bit. He tried to be a consequentialist about this sort of thing in general, but like many in his school of thought found truth to be also both an end in itself, and a precondition for making reasoned choices about all other matters. Truth to one's self at least; the same courtesies need not be extended to others where a conflict exists over not just means, but ends.
His employer, fortunately for him, had a rather different understanding of the relationship between truth, beauty, and other ends. Hiring an out of work academic to play the part of a wise old hermit living in his garden, provide sage advice on demand, and occasionally entertain guests at parties necessitated a certain internal detachment from the substance of things in service of the desired aesthetic. Chancellor Gambrish, Executor of the Collegium of Telecommunications and third-tier Florist political figure, was not a man burdened with a great respect for the truth when failing to acknowledge it might be of service towards his needs and desires. And so Jorphassh, former senior professor in political philosophy at the Institute for Philosophical Inquiry, of late fallen on hard times and working as a living garden ornament, was somehow mysteriously transmuted in his mind into Jorphassh, the wise old hermit who has been graciously allowed to live on the grounds and contemplate mortality, the Gornish condition and the great mysteries of the universe alone and in peace. Except when entertaining guests, of course, but peace is relative.
Shaking his head ruefully, he began to dig into his breakfast in earnest.
It had been fairly easy to get the job, once he knew it was out there. Most of the other candidates were insufficiently wise, and even if he was less wizened looking than some, he was old enough to project the desired image, especially after a long-lasting injection to dull his scale color and the laser eye surgery that made the spectacles necessary. He was still annoyed about that. He was well-spoken, solitary by nature, and able to impress the interviewer with his background in philosophy, all together better suited for the job than most of the other candidates. Of course, the hermit he was replacing had been fired for being caught out of uniform and blackout drunk in the more disreputable of the two taverns in the closest town, so perhaps the bar wasn't overly high. Not terribly hermit-like behavior, that.
The most surprising thing, he'd found, was that he had more influence now as a fake hermit than he ever did as one of the top academics in his field. The executor of a (relatively unimportant) collegium routinely came to him for advice, and he'd had opportunities to meet and briefly interact with a range of moderately important nobles and industrialists. So long as he kept it brief and made it sound profound enough, they even wanted to hear what he had to say! Approach them as an academic and he was a dangerous radical, out of touch or a waste of good warship money. Dress in rags and live in a cave, though, and suddenly he was in possession of deep and profound wisdom. Perhaps more importantly, by listening to it they could demonstrate to their peers just how deep and profound they must themselves be by association. There were of course limits to this, most notably when he started advocating something they weren't already inclined towards or when the smell grew to be more than they could tolerate, but having any kind of voice at all was an interesting and pleasant change.
There was a line he recalled from one of those interesting new texts that were starting to filter in from the Federation:
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
A/N: And now for something completely different. For some bizarre reason, my muse would not let me be on this. For the moment, it mostly serves to provide a window into the many failings of Gorn society, though there's a chance I may revisit the character. For those not aware, Jorphassh's job is all to real. And no, Jorphassh isn't really a Marxist (though who knows, if he keeps on reading...), I just saw an opportunity to cap things off nicely with a Marx quote, so of course I had to take it. How could I not?
