Late morning. The air is motionless and transparent. Like a sheet of glass stretched taut between two ages. A deceptive barrier: invisible, yet refusing to let one turn back. Stones, yellowish with a grayish sheen, crunch beneath the sandals, and each step is measured not only by the foot but by the rhythm of breath — inhale, exhale. An aging man climbs slowly up the hillside. He doesn't look around. His gaze is fixed on the ground — on its muted shimmer and roughness, on the winding thyme roots, between which the thin trails of ants run. Patches of green — bitter wormwood, ziziphus, a few gnarled laurel bushes — cling to the rocky slope like thoughts that refuse to settle and rise again and again.
Silence. Only the dry rasp of cicadas and a wind carrying the faintest hint of salt and rotting wood.
He walks in a tunic gray as the hour before dawn, holding with those same hands the carefully gathered folds of a long ash-violet cloth. Worn, but whole — like his faith in reason. Scrolls peek from the time-darkened leather of the satchel slung across his shoulder, the only wealth he wishes to possess. His hair, once black, is now nearly white, yet still thick. His face weathered, sharply drawn; his eyes tired but steady. His movements unhurried, like those of a man accustomed to weighing every decision.
He takes the last two steps — slowly, as though bracing for something — and lifts his head.
Before him rises a wall. For him it is no barrier; it is the remnant of something immeasurably greater. Gnawed by time and wind, it stands — neither resisting nor pleading — but remembering. In some places the limestone shows through reddened, where the marble facing was stripped away by hands of the people who no longer had need of the old god.
Along the line where the frieze once ran, carved symbols can still be traced — a fragment of a solar crown, the edge of a feather, the curve of a serpent slipping into a crevice. At the boundary of light and shadow, beside a half-ruined column, a wild fig grows, its roots gripping the hollowness. On the cracked cornice, a solitary poppy burns in the stillness.
The philosopher watches for a long time. Then he lowers his gaze — first to his sandals, then to the ground strewn with shattered slabs, tiny stones, scraps of marble and leaves — and walks northward along the wall.
He walks unhurriedly, as though listening to what the stones are telling him. From time to time he raises his eyes, letting them rest on the ruins of a doorway, on the remnants of a capital, on a broken staircase leading nowhere. All of it speaks to him in a language long familiar — the language of loss, the language of silence. He understands it, for today, like the temple once did, he's lost his last student. The same people who once needed the marble of its walls have taken him, though they had no use for the treasures those walls had guarded.
He reaches the end of the wall. Only then does he gather the courage to look at what the hill overlooks: a mosaic of red roofs and the deep blue of the bay. The city lies before him like a complex diagram stretched along a line of light. He gazes at it, shading his eyes with his hand.
In the beginning — in the source — there stands the tomb. Not a temple, not a mausoleum, but an emptiness encircled by stubborn stone blocks that still refuse to let the foundation collapse. The genius had left his place, leaving in the philosopher's soul a question: what kind of life was founded by one who subdued death so effortlessly?
A little to the north lies the territory of the former Library. Wordless. For a long time now there have been gardens and administrative courtyards in its stead. The thoughts that once took form there have scattered again, like the smoke of a lamp above a written scroll. The lecture halls, once meant to guide toward the light, have sunk into darkness. He remembers reading there. Now only the walls know it, and perhaps a pair of trembling old men in some hidden school.
The palace, rebuilt into a barracks. The amphitheater — collapsed like a throat that no longer knows how to sing.
He shifts his gaze again — the agora. Turned into a market. The lighthouse. It still stands, but its light inspires no awe now, only habit. And beside it — the buildings of the empire, heavy as thoughts of futility. Vaulted and somber, they press upon the space, as though their shadows have already fallen on the future. Square inner courtyards, wearisome stelae of decrees and bureaucratic marks. All of it feels like a blind attempt to hold on to order through stone rather than through the mind.
He looks at the city's layout, still discernible from above — its parallel streets, its clear axial lines, its proportions meant to make a human being a citizen of the cosmos. But now these lines serve only to make it easier to collect taxes and suppress uprisings. The hand that once drew this city, he thinks, drew from geometry. But those who live in it now no longer know even the arithmetic of the soul.
The city is still beautiful. And therefore sorrowful.
He turns away from it and walks along the northern wall, toward the place where a door once stood and where now only an empty space yawns between two fallen columns. And descending into the half-shadow — like a step across the boundary of the world — he enters within.
He enters as one enters a house long abandoned yet still remembering the name of its master.
Shards of broken lamps and tiles worn smooth as velvet crunch beneath his sandals. The floor here, beneath a thick layer of sand, once sparkled like the ripple of the bay on a sunny day, once reflected the stars of the night sky. The walls still carry traces of delicate painting: cinnabar faded to brown, ochre glinting in the fissures of limestone.
He walks as though moving through memories. He does not need to see to know: here was the vestibule where young men left their shoes. Here — the colonnade where he waited for his teacher. There — the inner courtyard with the cedar under which that teacher once sat in silence for nearly a whole day, and everyone listened to his silence as though it were music. In the center of the hall stood a statue. No one knew whether it was Plato, Serapis, or Apollo himself. In truth, it never mattered; statues here had always been bodies of ideas, not idols. Its pedestal is now cracked like the heart of a lover abandoned. Like his own heart.
He closes his eyes, and the place comes alive: a voice, footsteps, an argument. The fallen column gathers itself and once more the entablature settles upon its capital. Light running across the floor illuminates faces again. For a moment the philosopher thinks he can hear his teacher's voice. He almost answers, and then understands — it is only the wind playing in the ruined arches.
He moves on, across the hall toward the rear, the western wall. Toward the niche one must know about in order to find. The one that still hides its secret — a passage. Perhaps it was once used by students slipping out to the garden, away from unnecessary eyes. Or perhaps it was the priest's path, carrying the flame from the fire to the altar.
He leaves the temple. Steps onto the path leading to a place the city no longer considers its own — the necropolis. He does not know why he is going there. His feet simply carry him.
The entrance is hidden behind an oleander bush. He lights a torch. The catacombs receive him as one long awaited.
The walls are damp, smelling of earth and wax. The symbols are not words but gestures. Keys, eyes. Eagles, serpents. At times the torchlight flashes in the eyes of predatory lizards lurking in the niches. Underfoot — more fragments: sarcophagi, urns, lamps. He knows the catacombs served not only the dead but the living as well; they were a school, a temple, a refuge. Here hid those who lacked not air, but room for meaning. Gnostics, Christians, Platonists — the persecuted and the persecuting, who in time became the persecuted — all left traces here, in the stone, in this compressed memory of the city.
The catacombs branch like old arguments: one gallery leading to another, then to a third, and always deeper. An anchor, a fish. On one of the walls — a figure carved with outstretched arms inside a circle, crude. Above it — faint remnants of red paint. It was not Christ, nor Serapis, nor Osiris, but all of them at once. He stops, watching the flame dance across the figure's face. The symbols of the new teaching made their way even here — into the former hiding places of mysteries, where priests once whispered the names of gods, not knowing those names would be replaced by the names of men.
To know the Light, one must first descend into the Dark. But he does not argue with them. He understands them. He, too, had sought the Light, and the path to it lay not up a staircase but through labyrinths.
They call it redemption.
But perhaps all the soul truly wants is to be seen to the end. Even by a single gaze, even for a moment…
What is he thinking? Has he really lost his way?!
A sharp breath — and dizziness.
The torch begins to crackle, its flame turning uneven. He turns into a side passage — narrow, slightly taller than the others. The walls here are smooth, untouched by inscriptions. He feels he is nearing the surface. The flame grows pale — as though dawn were ahead of him, once more.
He emerges into the ruins of some house. No ceiling — only a slanted rectangle of sky. A dusty courtyard, bushes of rosemary and laurel rooted into the walls, dry. Everything is silent. No one lives here, yet the house is not dead — it has simply retreated inward, like the philosopher himself.
Through a break in the wall he steps onto a narrow street. It leads toward light.
It leads toward noise. His eyes are momentarily blinded by midday. The air quivers above the paving stones, and the noise — not sound, but a dense, hot hum — rushes at him in a countercurrent, as though the city itself were exhaling people.
Once this road was a straight thought carved into stone — from mind to heart, from truth to desire. Now it has come to resemble a restless dream: everything here shifts, chews, argues, drags, buy, sell, shout. Each person has a purpose, yet together they do not move — they seep and swirl. Like sluggish eddies in standing water.
The smell is complex: the sweetness of dates, smoke from a brazier, sweat, manure, incense. He dives into it, swims against the current, toward the source, slipping around whirlpools, observing.
A young Syrian at a crossroads is chanting lines from Plotinus, reshaping them into a street song, for which he earns a slap on the back of the head from an impatient philosopher who immediately vanishes back into the crowd. A shopkeeper is shouting at a black woman who has handed him a bronze sestertius with a countermark. A Roman soldier, leaning against a wall, lazily scratches a swastika with a nail. A Jewish girl in a toga walks past, clutching a scroll to her chest, and he thinks: there are still some who carry text, not only food.
A city is a body. The agora — its heart, pulsing with the blood of desires. The temples — its eyes, taking in the light and returning it, purified. The academies — its brain, where form rises and is understood. The markets — its stomach, the sewers — its lower channels. All of it once functioned. All of it breathed. And there was a place in this body for a soul.
He stops in the shade of an awning to look at the ruins of the gallery where philosophy still once walked on foot. Where they once debated eidos and first principles, goats now graze.
The city no longer has a brain. The heart still beats, but it no longer knows what to desire. The eyes remain, but they look at the ground. The stomach works without pause, but it chews on itself. And no one remembers what the soul once was. Because when reason dies, the soul does not depart — it forgets who it was.
He feels it in his body. A world stripped of thought has grown heavy. People speak and do not hear. Search and do not understand what exactly. Desire and forget why.
A charm-seller with a cheerful face offers him the Eye of Horus "against dark thoughts." The philosopher gives no answer; he only looks — as though the amulet truly were working.
Perhaps reason was a kind of pain. But without pain there is no path upward.
He looks at the face of the city the way one looks at a sick friend whom one cannot heal, only accompany, and turns off the road into the first alley. It swallows the noise. Narrow, as if pressed between two lines of text. Between the roofs, a faded strip of cloth is stretched. Its wavering shadow grants a long-awaited coolness.
He walks slowly, feeling within him the rise of that particular state that comes in a library a moment before your hand reaches the scroll you need. But ahead lies a dead end — a blank wall of large stones seals the way, as if fate itself refuses to negotiate the ending.
And yet, a door previously unseen swings slightly open — wooden, old, a crack running across the lower board, without lock or knocker. Light pours from within — soft, diffused, as though from the glow of orange-blossom petals heavy with sap in someone's hidden garden. This light does not call, does not beckon, but allows. There is no command in it, only permission to be.
The philosopher stops. His sandals creak against the dust. His hand rests on the jamb but does not push. He stands there, not entering, because he hesitates. Because he knows: any light demands an answer. And if you enter, you will no longer be able to say you did not see.
He closes his eyes. As if asking: is it time? For it is precisely now — on this day, in this hour — that the danger of slipping downward is greatest. And without waiting for an answer, he steps inside.
He crosses the threshold and at once feels it: the air here is different — not merely fresh, but listening.
The garden is enclosed by the walls of an old house, partly overgrown with grapevine, its tiles chipped, yet all in a strange, kindly neglect. Nothing seems out of place: not the rusted jug left beneath the lavender, nor the mosaic that was never fully cleaned — as though someone keeps the trace of time here as a relic.
He takes a few steps along the stone-laid path and senses: someone was here before him. Perhaps just now. Perhaps always. Sunlight, filtering through the leaves of the fig and pomegranate trees, casts patches of light on the ground — like flashes of memory, not his own, yet familiar.
He breathes in the scent of myrtle, the silent rustle of rosemary, the white jasmine blossoms that should not be here at this time of year. The signs — a tomb slab carved with a cross, a reworked portico with the figure of a lamb barely visible in the plaster — tell him: this is no mere garden; this is the courtyard of a Christian house. Perhaps a church. He recoils without meaning to, feels a sting in his chest. The house of the enemy. Those who cast his teacher from the chair, destroyed the gymnasia, and turned philosophy into heresy.
He turns to leave, but stops. And where are his friends now? Consumed by busyness, driven out, dead. But silence — here it is. Here. He lowers himself onto a stone bench beside the frankincense shrubs, places his hands upon his knees, and closes his eyes.
And in this silence he hears music for the first time. At first — only its absence. Then — a rhythm. Then — the breath of wind in the leaves, the tremor of petals, the shadow of a passing bird. And at last — a voice.
He opens his eyes and sees a girl. She walks barefoot across the marble slabs, unafraid of the sharp edges. She strokes the palm leaves as though they were the hand of an old nurse. She hums under her breath. He doesn't know the language — or perhaps he does, but has forgotten. It is one of the psalms, the kind that usually sound like a sentence. But from her lips it is a lullaby for a world tired of being grown.
She neither performs nor coquettishly pretends. In her movements there is only that calm which cannot be forged: as though she has lived here forever, and every leaf, every stone knows her and speaks with her. Her gaze glides across the garden and lingers on him.
He waits for judgment, or pious fear, or at least surprise. But she looks at him… just as she looked a moment ago at the fig leaf. Not with fondness or pity, but with joyful curiosity. As though his very existence were a gift to her.
Under that gaze, he begins to understand. So this is why one must learn to be silent and to listen. Why one must master the ideas, tune the mind to see the universal. So that, in the end, one can grasp the immeasurable vastness of the particular. The beauty of every variation. For it is they that do not distort but fill the One, making it infinite, making it eternal. So that one may discover there is yet another step — one no one warned him about.
Then he notices sadness in her eyes. Not a child's hurt, not an adult's disappointment. But longing. Yet not the kind that once burned him — the longing for what never was. A different one. Much purer. Much quieter. A longing for something that is — here — but is about to slip away.
He feels it echo within him. And time pauses, trying to hold that inevitable moment in place. And the fabric of the garden becomes a sponge, to absorb the premature sorrow and leave in the air only joy.
But then — the creak of a door, like a sign that the irreversible has taken place, and footsteps, heralds of retribution for trespassing upon the sacred.
«Who would have thought,» a voice sounds — a little mocking, a little confessional — «that I would meet you here. And at such an improper hour for a philosopher — between the sixth and the ninth.»
The philosopher lifts his head. Before him stands a man in a light tunic, a leather belt circling a narrow waist. A face that seemed at once young and tired. He recognizes him at once.
«You still know how to arrive unannounced,» the philosopher replies. «And you still wear my gait.»
The priest smirks.
«But no longer your sandals.» He studies the old man intently. «You are alone — and yet not lonely? You did not come here for doctrine, surely?»
«Of course not,» the philosopher answers. «One does not come here to learn, but to be forgiven. And forgiveness needs no teacher. Only a judge.»
«Oh?» the priest raises an eyebrow. «And what if a man has come for comfort? Not all seek truth. Some seek warmth. Or at least — a hand.»
The philosopher shrugs.
«Comfort is beggary of the soul. When the soul ceases striving for light, it looks for shade. You do not give them truth — you merely let them stop hurting.»
«Sometimes that is the truth.» After a brief pause the priest continues. «Or perhaps your soul is simply weary of the light? If all your students have left you, maybe it is time to admit that the teacher is no longer you?»
The philosopher squints, not in anger — in the attempt to find an angle from which this wouldn't look vulgar.
«And you think you became a teacher because people listen to you with their eyes closed? That is not discipleship. That is hypnosis.»
«But you came to me. To my garden, beneath my cross.»
«I came to the garden.» He glances toward the girl. «The cross is what you imagined.»
The priest falls silent, and for the first time there is something heavy in his gaze, something not of this game of words.
«Perhaps you are merely afraid. That is why you walled your soul in concepts as though in a stone tomb — not to open it, but so no one could look inside.»
The philosopher does not answer. Not in thought, not in speech. He only looks at him the way one looks at a man who is allowed to speak the last word. The priest, mistaking the silence for defeat, nods with the politeness of a victor.
«We will meet again. I hope so.»
He turns and leaves, noticing neither the girl nor the traces of her bare feet on the dusty tiles, nor the music she is filling the air with.
The philosopher sits motionless for a long time. Not even hunched — simply quieted. It is not defeat that saddens him, but the truth of the words. What torments him is not that his former student happened to strike the very heart, but that the heart truly was such. And also the bitterness of realizing: both of them had called themselves "seeing" — and both had passed by the light. As one passes by a flower blooming in the dust. And this, indeed, is the real emptiness.
The girl waits until he finishes the thought, then settles beside him and asks:
«Why did you argue with him? You already understood everything. To contemplate the light, a person doesn't need other people to do the same. To be happy, a person doesn't need others to seek happiness in the same place.»
He is ashamed of his behavior; he does not know himself why he got drawn into the argument — out of habit, perhaps.
«How old are you?» the philosopher asks.
«Nine,» the girl replies.
«How is it that at nine you could understand what has not been revealed to me at fifty-two?»
«From heart to mind, from desire to truth,» she turns his own thoughts over, «not the other way around. Your mind reached a dead end, and you followed your heart. It was not truth that led you here, but the desire for it. Now use your reason to understand what it is you truly seek.»
He is stunned.
«How do you know me?»
The girl remains silent, touching the laurel leaves, as if what must be said should be born on its own — like a light out of the void.
«And you… you feel familiar to me as well,» he continues, surprised by his own words. «Not in your voice, not in your face — in something elusive, like the smell of air before rain that intoxicates with freedom, like the sun beams after it ends that restores memory.»
«You've met me often — in words, in rays, in songs. But never like this.» She says it quietly, with a soft smile. He does not understand. «You knew my father.»
His brow tightens into the crease she already knows. His gaze darts, leaping through memories, names, and faces. None of them fit.
«I taught philosophy to hundreds of young men, but none of them…»
«Don't look among people,» she interrupts gently. «You knew him when you first understood that light can be reason. And when, grown older, you could no longer speak the name without doubt. Since then, you've greeted every dawn with his words.» She holds out a sprig of laurel.
He takes it, turning it slowly between his fingers, and then — he recoils from his own guess. He fears it, because if it is true, then the girl truly is blessed. But every part of him insists it is not madness — that it is a riddle, and he simply needs time to untangle it.
«What are you doing here?» he finally asks.
«Waiting for you.»
His heart contracts. For the first time in many years he yields to a feeling without trying to run it through the mind.
«Then come with me.»
«I can't. Now it really is too early,» she answers calmly. «You came too late.»
Another riddle with no key. But he feels he must not surrender so easily.
«But I did come!»
Now fear seizes him — he remembers that new kind of longing he saw in her eyes. He does not want to experience it.
The girl smiles gently and lays a hand on his shoulder. This is how their angels must smile, he thinks — comforting in suffering, shielding from demons. He grows calm. He sees that she understands the reason for his fear, that she feels the same — and that she is not afraid of it.
«Next time,» she says, «you will come earlier.»
He feels that the time has come to part. He is composed again, calm again, even content — as never before. His face glows with serenity. He carries this longing with him. Now it is his, too. Warm, tender, it leads him into the future.
He steps back into the alley. In his hands — nothing. But inside him — everything.
Along the narrow path between the walls, as if walking the boundary between worlds, he returns to the road. It is the same as ever: scorching, loud, overflowing with the scents of spices, the cries of merchants, the sun, the clamor, the dust. Yet all this chaos no longer weighs upon him. It sounds around him like the final chord of a hymn at the doors of a temple. But inside the temple — there is always silence and peace. He carries its light with him. Now it is his, too. True, it illuminates his way from within.
People rush past, unaware of him. And he no longer looks at them — not from indifference, but from a new, previously unknown kind of respect. He smiles. Not at himself, not at the city, not at what has passed — but at her. The one who remains behind, in the garden, beneath the fig and myrtle, where it will always be bright, even if the sun does not rise. He knows — he will not return there. And she knows it too.
Next time you will come earlier, she said