This Is a Book (4 page)

Violet watched, and as she did, she remained tan (still with tan
but now also with impressed). I asked her to dance. She said yes. We were purple and then blue and then green with rotating DJ lights. As we danced, I fantasized about someday being gray with old age with Violet.

Looking into Violet’s pretty eyes, which were now a little peach with reflection of my face in them, I felt a real connection. In that moment it felt like everything disappeared except for me and Violet. Then her boyfriend showed up. When I saw him, I became red with embarrassment. He was black with heritage and silver with strange, irridescent muscle shirt. I tried to explain to him that I didn’t know that Violet had a boyfriend.

“I don’t care,” he said, his front teeth gold with gold.

He wanted to fight me. But I didn’t want to fight him. Then he said I was yellow with fear. That made me red with rage, but the truth is, I was also a little yellow with fear, which, when mixed with the rage, made me orange with both together (also, I was a little red with sunburn too, but that’s not important).

Carl, who is yellow with being Asian, said he thought that I was more white with fear at the time. But he was green with hiding behind a plant at that point, so I don’t put much stock in his opinion. Either way, the fight started.

I quickly became purple with punches to the face and, on and off, even more purple with DJ lights that were still rotating. Things got worse when Violet’s boyfriend pushed me into a candle. I turned orange with fire and then gray with smoke. Thankfully, I quickly became pink with fruit punch after Carl threw some on me to put out the fire.

Violet’s boyfriend dragged her away. I looked for her, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.

A few minutes later Carl and I left the party.

I was blue with sadness and also with windbreaker, which was now slightly melted from the fire. I just wanted to get drunk and forget about Violet.

Carl decided to go home, so I called my friend Joey to see if he
wanted to hang out. Joey is white, really white, with being albino. We’ve known each other since we were black with graduation gowns.

I told Joey to meet me at a bar in the neighborhood. He did. Shortly after we arrived at the bar I met a girl inside who was Amber with stripper name. Her eyes were aqua with colored contact lenses and her skin was orange with spray tan. When she spoke, I noticed her teeth were bright white with teeth whitener (even whiter than Joey is with albinism). She didn’t look great, but I was drunk and I didn’t care.

We started to make out. We made out for a while, a long while. Then Amber suddenly got up and said she had to go. She left and that sucked because it left me blue with balls. A few minutes later I left, albeit very slowly.

When I got home, I was green with nausea. At least that’s what my roommate, who is peach with skin, said. I passed out in the kitchen and became beige with instant oatmeal that was in the bowl where my face landed. I got up from the table and somehow I made it to my bed.

When I woke up the next morning I was brown with stubble and rainbow with bruises and hangover. I looked at myself in the mirror and became chartreuse with self-pity. Then I noticed the time. I had overslept and was about to be late for work, which would be sure to make me pink with pink slip.

I finished getting ready and rushed out the door, becoming teal with hurry. I got to work just in time, stopping only once, at a traffic light that was red with signal. That was a good thing because I was green with being new at the job.

Anyway, these days I am mostly green and blue with striped pajamas and frequently orange with fingertips as I eat Doritos while sitting on my couch. I’ve been doing that a lot lately, because I got laid off. I’m doing okay though because I know that life isn’t always black and white with certainty. Sometimes you end up in an area that is gray with being in a transitional phase or something. I’ll be fine.

Still, from time to time, I can’t help but feel a little blue with sadness when I think about Violet Gold.

Socrates had been working on and off as a philosopher for years without much success. He could barely pay his rent and was often not even sure if his place existed, both philosophically and because of its lousy square footage. He had found some moderate success as a freelance thinker, getting hired from time to time to ponder for an aristocrat or to ruminate for an idiot, but such opportunities were sporadic and never paid very well. His career was in trouble.

The truth was that, aside from thinking, Socrates possessed no marketable skills. And while he was pretty good at making small talk, that would not become a paid profession for another two thousand years, and even then only on late-night television.

As far as work experience was concerned, Socrates had very little. He had worked in a Greek restaurant as a young man but was fired after customers complained about the “annoying waiter” who had pestered customers with “difficult questions” about their orders.

Sometime later Socrates’s cousin managed to get him a job as a tour guide, but the struggling philosopher’s whole “I know nothing” schtick did not fly with the tour company, and Socrates was fired after only one day on the job. To supplement his income, Socrates had now resorted to doing odd jobs for people in the neighborhood, mostly as a handyman. And now well into middle
age, he was facing the very real possibility that he might never succeed. But fate would intervene, as it so often did in ancient Greece, giving Socrates a real shot at stardom.

As it turned out, Athens was fast becoming a hotbed of thinking, and the timing could not have been better for the aging philosopher-handyman.

It had all started a few months earlier when notions began flooding into Greece from Phoenicia, btes was y of the merchant brooding class. When some of the more obsessive Greeks got hold of these notions, they turned them into full-fledged thoughts. Soon people began thinking in groups, and these thinking groups became “schools of thought.” And that’s when things really started to pick up.

First came the Sophists, a group of thinkers who used the tools of rhetoric to teach virtue. Then came the Rationalists. They specialized in using reason to uncover fundamental truths. Shortly after that, a third group emerged, who would prove to be more influential, and considerably more irritating, than any other group in Athens. They called themselves the Publicists.

The Publicists were, by far, the least thoughtful of all the new Athenian schools. They thought much less about Truth or Reason and much more about themselves. Still, the Publicists quickly became the most talked about school in all of Greece. This was due, in no small part, to their practice of talking about themselves even more than they thought about themselves.

While the Sophists sought
arete
(virtuous excellence), the Publicists sought
me-rete
(shameless self-promotion). And where the Rationalists employed logic, the Publicists used gossip, which was becoming even more popular than democracy among Greece’s new “it” crowd.

The Publicists, realizing that they had very little thinking of their own to contribute, had cultivated a rhetorical method that enabled them to simply attach themselves to other thinkers. They practiced what scholars call “irrational indispensability.” It is a
means by which one person places himself into another person’s business, and then convinces that person or “client” that he needs to pay him for it.

One day, while he was having lunch with his agent, Socrates met one of the Publicists. This Publicist, whose name is not known to history—though some scholars believe she was called “Jackie”—had become one of the most powerful Publicists in all of Athens.

Jackie approached Socrates as he was pondering his kebab. She told him that she was a “big fan.” Socrates, still chewing, was flattered.

“Why don’t we do lunch?” said Jackie.

“ ‘
Do
lunch’?” replied Socrates. “But a person can only ‘eat’ lunch, no?”

“Well, only if that person is not in show business,” Jackie responded.

At this Socrates and his agent smiled and nodded.

And before he could fully comprehend, or finish his kebab, Socrates had made an appointment to do lunch with Jackie.

Unlike Socrates, Jackie had already become a star in her field. She was already known for being one of the shallowest thinkers in all of Greece. And now she was so busy she could hardly get through a conversation without being interrupted by one of the many messengers she constantly had coming and going. In fact, Jackie was one of the first people to use “messenger waiting,” which enabled her to have several messengers going at the same time. (This was a practice many Publicists employed in order to make themselves seem more important to prospective clients.)

A week later Socrates met Jackie for lunch. As they spoke she told him several times that she thought he was “amazing!” In fact, after just about anything Socrates said, Jackie responded with “amazing!” sometimes changing the inflection to “uh-mayzing!”

Socrates was charmed.

Jackie went on and on about how much she admired Socrates and his “unique perspective” and told him how she loved his “whole question thing.”

To this Socrates replied, “What do you mean?”

“Exactly!” Jackie responded. “That’s what I’m talking about. Uhh-mayyzing!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Socrates, clearly flattered and completely disarmed.

“Well I do,” she replied. “You are
fantastic
. Everyone needs to know how fantastic you are. You
have
to let me help you. People need to know about Socrates and his question thing.”

By the time the conversation was over, the Publicist had convinced Socrates that he needed to work with her. But when she told him how much Publicity would cost, Socrates began to have second thoughts. But then Jackie explained that she had already sent several messengers out on his behalf and, therefore, technically, she and Socrates were already working together.

Socrates became philosophical. He asked himself, “Is man essentially good, despite hiring someone to promote him?” And then he asked himself, “Do I want to go back to doing odd-jobs for people in the neighborhood?” And with that he decided to give the whole Publicist thing a shot.

Jackie got right to work, promising Socrates that she would make him famous. “We’re going to create the Socrates ‘brand,’ ” she explained. “Socrates is not just a person or a philosophy. It’s an industry, and that’s how we will sell you.”

First, she convinced Socrates to lose his last name.

“Socrates Pappandreopoulos is too clunky for people,” she told him. Your name should be simple and catchy and it should tell people that you are a hot philosopher, who seeks truth and does it with his own cool question method.”

Socrates suggested “Socrates Truth” as a stage name for himself.

“Nah, too on the head,” responded Jackie.

Then Socrates pitched “Socrates?” as a stage name.

“Nah,” she countered. “That makes you sound unsure of yourself. You should just be ‘Socrates.’ It’s direct. It’s strong. And it has a good ring to it.”

And from then on Socrates was billed as “Socrates.”

Jackie’s instincts proved right. Overnight, Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher.

Jackie continued to promote Socrates. She got him booked at parties. He worked at weddings. She promoted him at local schools and in the Agora. Socrates suddenly found himself thinking all over Athens, and often in front of large crowds. His career was flourishing more than he could have ever imagined. At the same time, though, he felt a creeping emptiness. As he spent more and more time searching for publicity, he spent less and less time searching for truth. And, with all of his public appearances, Socrates was also becoming overexposed.

He was also spending a lot of money. In addition to paying his agent and now his Publicist, Socrates was paying an Empiricist, a Monist, and a Stylist as well, all of whom were recommended by Jackie.

Socrates was getting uncomfortable. He scheduled a meeting with Jackie. This time they “grabbed” lunch, as both had become even busier and more entrenched in show business.

At lunch Socrates voiced his misgivings.

“Should I be doing all of this?” he asked. “I mean, is the unexamined life even worth—”

“Are you being serious?” interrupted Jackie. “Do you want to be a star philosopher or do you want to go back to waiting tables?”

Jackie was one of the few people who really knew how to handle Socrates, usually by cutting him off and answering his questions with a question of her own. And, as always, she managed to convince Socrates that she was right and avoid being fired. Socrates listened to her, then paid for both of their lunches and went right back to work.

It was shortly after that fateful lunch that the backlash began. Socrates’s constant questions had become intolerable to many of the
Greek elite. Still, as his Publicist had promised, he had become a brand. Imitators all over Athens were now practicing the new
Socratic Method
. More and more young people were asking each other questions and doing it with Socrates’s patented smart-assy tone.