AFTER THUCYDIDES
Corinth, Argos, Sparta, Athens, Sicyon, and other (how many?)
smaller cities—
the Greeks have become a thousand fragments; the great treaty has
been broken;
everyone is enraged with everyone else—new meetings, meetings and
more meetings, conferences;
yesterday’s friends and neighbors no longer greet each other in the
street—
old grudges have come between them again; new alliances,
entirely opposite to earlier ones, are being sounded out, prepared.
Deputations
arrive secretly at midnight; others leave. The statues of our heroes,
standing neglected in the city squares and gardens, are shat on by
sparrows.
Group after group in the agora discuss our situation seriously,
exaltedly, passionately: Who gave them their orders? Who appointed
them?
We, anyway didn’t choose them (Besides, how? And when? New
bosses again? Who needs them?) April has arrived;
the small pepper trees on the sidewalks have turned green— a gentle
green,
tender, childlike (moving to us) even if
rather dusty—the municipal service seems to be out of it,
no longer showing up in the afternoon to sprinkle the streets. But
today,
on the portico surrounding the closed Council Chambers, the first
swallow appeared unexpectedly,
and everybody shouted: “A swallow; look, a swallow; look a
swallow”—
everybody in unison, even the most violently opposed: “A swallow.”
And suddenly
everybody fell silent, feeling alone, detached from the others, as
though free,
as though united in continuity, within a communal isolation. And
then
they understood that their only freedom was their solitude, but that
too
(though imperceptible) unprotected, vulnerable, a thousand times
entrapped, alone.
