106 Ancient Ideals
surely by virtue of his fraught relations with reading. No au then tic
thinker could write an essay as unambivalently appreciative of
books— books as repositories of wisdom, books as physical trea sures
(especially that)—as Walter Benjamin does in “Unpacking My
Library.” Benjamin adored his books. When he had ordered and
shelved them, he was at home. The true thinker does not ever feel at
home, at least on the phenomenal earth. Philosophy is not homesick-
ness, as Novalis says it is. Rather philosophy is homelessness itself,
a pained homelessness perhaps, but one replete with the under-
standing that the un- housed condition (physical, spiritual) is part of
what makes genuine thought possi ble. The wanderer does not carry
much. He cannot transport a library on his back, nor should he.
Socrates is he who does not write, nor does he appear to read a
great deal. He learns what he does— which is, among other things,
that there is no one in Athens wiser than he (though he knows
nothing)— through conversation and experience. Famously he and
Plato (great writer that he is) mistrust writing. Writing is a poison
that dulls the mind, which needs to remember Truth on its own or
discover it directly. Writing creates a duality: I and it; the text and
me. Whereas unity, becoming identical with the Truth, is what the
thinker wants. The true lords of life— the thinker, the saint, the hero,
and (perhaps) the poet— are devoted to monism; they want to dis-
solve the gap between I and it, or between the I and the it that truly
matters.
To the thinker, certain books are mere gossip. To be sure, for the
thinker after Plato there are books that pay to read and reread,
or to ignore with a passion. But thinkers ultimately think their own
thoughts, which are the thoughts of humanity, or the thoughts of
heaven, and not the thoughts of other individuals. For if you become
a thinker, you believe that the work is not yet done. No one has seen
the heavens and the earth as, in themselves, they really are.