Of the following story, from the chronicles of the medieval Syrian writer John Malalas, I need hardly say that multiple versions exist: the first extracted from his own works, and the second as a footnote in a certain autobiography in the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda. Both versions are mostly alike, differing only in minor clerical details, but their endings reflect significantly different hopes and attitudes.
I first heard the story in Istanbul – it was told to me by a blind man whom I had given a crust of bread, a remnant of a Sunday lunch preserved in a napkin from a nearby restaurant. His account cited Malalas as its inspiration, and contained the greater detail, and it will therefore serve as my primary source in retelling the following:
A certain man comes into a great sum of money, and having constructed a house in an out-of-the-way suburb eschews all outside news, busying himself only with his large garden and personal collections. If anyone tries to update him as to the state of the world outside, he thinks, he will shush them and bid them leave his home, preferring the stillness of the unchanging garden. This is hardly a problem for him, however, since nobody comes to visit at all. Far from causing him distress or depression, he thinks the lack of human contact will merely heighten the pleasure of the meeting he expects to have before the end. He receives, after countless empty decades, only one visitor.
This visitor is a lady, a girl of the world who had spent significant time with him in their youth, who now busies herself with activism and with news and current affairs. Unmarried, dedicated only to social change, she works on public policy and calls for upheaval and revolution, fighting for the rights of various oppressed groups. Whether she visits her old friend out of a sense of charity, nostalgia, or as a social duty is not known: in this, as in many other details, the accounts differ.
She appears at his door, and he answers quickly as if he were expecting her to call upon him at that very moment. The man gives her a smile and a greeting that has been out of fashion for decades – something that would have brought ridicule upon anyone else, and yet coming from the mouth of this reclusive old friend it seems natural and even the perfect statement. It makes her laugh, and her concerns are forgotten. She had expected that to happen.
(For it is a fact that once everything around the woman became the source and subject of jokes, once everything holy and good was derided and all serious feeling replaced by superlative irony, she cast her gaze back in time and remembered those old sentiments and quotes from her childhood, and began to laugh at them, too, those things she’d once taken with a little girl’s terrible seriousness. However, her new laughter comes not from mockery, but relief at finally remembering the presence of earnestness in the world.)
Once this greeting is exchanged, the visitor is invited inside the recluse’s house, and she finds nothing has changed since her youth. All the furniture remains, and the photographs on the walls are in the exact positions they occupied on her last visit, as if her old friend were the curator of an untouchable museum rather than a man simply living in his own home. They drink coffee and tea.
He continues to speak in his old-fashioned way, and her updates to him concerning herself and her work are lies, fictions born either of a desire to protect him, or to protect herself from him; she knows not how the self-exiled creature will respond to her news of the world, and her new self, so changed from the time they last met.
In the first version of the story, she leaves after a socially acceptable period of time, and their conversation becomes an oasis in her memory, a place to which she can retreat when she finds all that is lovely is lost. She tells him nothing of the world outside, revealing nothing of her new self and not needing to – for in his presence she reverts to her old self again. All her intellectual developments and great and grand theories melt away in the presence of a childlike joy at the regaining of what she thought to be long gone. She returns to the smoke-cloud outside, resigns her emotional possessions and recalibrates her sense of cynicism, and newly armed she begins the struggle again.
Thus ends the beggar’s account.
In the second version of the story, their reunion is marred by violence: the friend’s parochialism vexes his visitor, who entreats that he finally mature and properly inspect the world around him; showing him a newspaper she brought in a pocket, filled with the daring accomplishments of others, the visitor enlightens her friend as to the state of current affairs and the new meaning of his retreat from everything. She is betrayed and shamed by his continual reservations, all the more so as a response to her boldness in returning to the house. She challenges him and attempts to provoke an answer. Then, finding his words insufficient, she sets upon him furiously in revenge for his decades of resignation, his placid Epicurean repose. “Exploring hands encounter no defence,” says the text. She is consumed by ‘terrible and evil emotions’, and when her madness fades and she comes to herself again, her friend lies surprised, smiling in that state the Greeks call teleosis, in sweet death upon the floor.
The Suda remarks that the second version is the more optimistic, a paradoxical statement yet strangely compelling, and a clear example of Byzantine philosophy if nothing else. And yet due to a labyrinthine sentence construction in the original Greek it is not quite clear what the footnote exactly refers to. The matter is made all the more confusing by the fact that the first version of the tale, from Malalas, is not remarked upon in the same encyclopedia and is seemingly unknown to the chronicler. If this is kept in mind, the reference to a second interpretation becomes rather more ambiguous.
And we can see it must be an example of medieval Greek writing – the puritanical description of her incredibly human emotions as ‘terrible and evil’ could only have come from a culture permanently dissatisfied with itself, forever seeking perfect self-expression in the language of divinity. The tale itself, however, is likely not of Byzantine origin, but merely a medieval preservation of an earlier, unremarked pagan story.
In examining the two stories and their dialectic between stagnation and development, preservation and destruction, perseverance and submission, chastity and passion, one supposes there actually is a certain wild joy to be found in the latter account. And yet one might also think the consequences of that account so terrible that they might wish for the first story to be the only truth.
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