Exercises in Thought: “Tim Carroll / Joe Sweeney”

Joe Sweeney: “Tim Carroll”

I remember one day I tried to explain something. I reminded you of that scholar who argued that the fictional Cephalus’ flawed definition of justice could be indexed against the historical Cephalus to bring about a compelling insight.

The scholar claimed that, upon hearing Plato’s fictionalized Cephalus define justice as “telling the truth and paying one’s debts,” a culturally literate Athenian audience would recall Cephalus’ role in selling shields to the Athenian hoplites who were the misery of the rest of the Greek world, of Scione and Melos and Syracuse. Once the Athenians began feverishly pursuing inhumane military and economic conquest, justice clearly demanded that Cephalus break his financial agreements. Failing this, he received his just deserts: When Athens fell to Sparta, the new rulers, outraged at their long suffering, murdered countless wealthy Athenian metics and their heirs, first among them Polemarchus, heir of Cephalus. Therefore, a culturally literate Athenian audience, upon minimal reflection, would see how Cephalus’ unexamined definition of justice led to his tragic end.

This is what the scholar argues but it is not, I tried to explain, what Socrates would argue. I reminded you that when Socrates stood trial for corrupting the youth, stood before a jury seeking the penalty of death, he argued that he could not fear death, because to fear death would be to know that it was the loss of life, and this he could not know just as anyone could not know it. So if for Cephalus’ unexamined life Polemarchus was staked on a sacrificial pyre and his blood soaked the stones down to the earth — it may have been something tragic but it just as well could’ve been something else.

And I tried to explain that if we find the scholar’s argument compelling, it is because Cephalus’ end at last urges us to condemn the life he lived, because such an end is the fate of those who go through life without understanding how to truly live. But if we find this argument compelling, I tried to explain, we must not find Socrates very compelling, because Socrates, who was wiser than all men because he knew he was not wise, didn’t know how to live either. And if Plato indexed the fictional Cephalus’ unexamined life against the tragic end of the historical Cephalus in order to produce the greatest possible dramatic effect on his culturally literate audience, think how much more ringingly such an effect plays out in the soul of that would-be philosopher who would feel, without any need of reference to an end tragic or otherwise, the shock that they have not known themselves and will not be knowing themselves.

I forget what you were wearing. It must have been a beige suit jacket. Some type of dress shoes. An earring in one ear. Black-rimmed glasses. A red tie. You pulled out the course reader, and I pulled out my copy of Augustine’s “Confessions” and I put you to shame.

We were in class, and the night before you had posted on Moodle about something. I don’t remember what, but you had made an off-hand comment about my habit of intensely staring at the person who is talking in class. Professor Sitze brought it up in class and had I taken that as a sign to stop staring intensely at people, I never would have been able to forgive either of you. But I didn’t take it as a sign of such and the class and the rest of my life proceeded without hiccups in this vein.

We were driving back from “John Wick 4” at AMC theaters in the MGM Casino in Springfield. You told me how good you were at pen-spinning in middle school, and I was blown away.

We were in class, and you were fielding various feeble challenges to a legal paradigm that would end the endless suffering of various animals. I remember how completely you seemed to have heard it all before and how very near you seemed to being ready to hear it all again.

I was telling you that the Muck-Rake article on Professor Sitze was actually pretty good and that you should check it out. “Big balls,” I said, some other time the same night while we were walking up or down the path to Marsh, “Big balls.” That was one of the first times I heard you laugh hard, and that was good.

Sometimes I’ll be walking around campus and I’ll hear someone laugh and I’ll turn around and it won’t be you. Just some guy. I’ll turn around and I’ll walk the rest of the way to Val.

Someone said that when you are young, the attempts you make to write about the people who will be closest to you are doomed to be halting and embarrassing, simply because what they are to you is still too near. On the day that I speak well of these things, know that I am far away and that I am still not knowing what they are.

Tim Carroll: “Joe Sweeney”

Everyone needs a friend like Joe. Not everyone can be friends with Joe. Nor should everyone be friends with Joe (Joe cannot and should not be friends with everyone, either). But everyone needs a friend in their life like Joe.

Something that’s remarkable about my relationship with Joe is that we have ended up taking a lot of classes together. We did not plan to take these classes together, but our interests independently drew us into the same classes. I might say that this sparked our relationship, but I might also say that it was purely a side effect of what might have sparked our relationship regardless. In the spring of our freshman year, I sat at the front right of a lecture hall in SMudd, and Joe, I think, sat in the back left corner. We never spoke to each other in class. Maybe we spoke outside of class. These things are hard to remember.

People remark how volatile first-year friend groups are. Fewer people remark how relationships change over the rest of your four years — how people pull out of some groups, weasel their way into others — perhaps because there is no clear pattern that everyone experiences, whereas almost everyone can attest to latching on to some random group of people during their first semester. The feeling of my relationship with Joe was like stumbling across a small sapling in the forest. I kept walking this same path and I kept seeing this sapling. With enough time, luck, and care, it has grown into something formidable. This experience is rare but is one of the best parts of attending a residential liberal arts college.

Joe has written about his dancing before, but he is too modest to engage in a self-indulgent examination of his style, so let me do so here: On the dance floor, he has this way of circling yet tarrying the area. His footfall speeds up and slows down to a hidden beat. His eyelids drop down, or shoot up, like a trance comes over him. It cannot be that Joe affects any of these moves; he must let the atmosphere and the music come over him.

But one thing Joe and I did affect, sort of, was our senior year fall schedule. We had an identical schedule (except for our thesis credits). I also affected the beginning of this column when I asked Joe if he would want to do it. One reason for my doing so which I was a bit too coy to admit before was that I wanted an excuse to share more time with Joe. But not just any time with Joe — a specific kind of time where we have some thoughts before us, and we are circling them, tarrying with them. Like when you and a friend are sitting around a fire. You are both looking into the fire, adding wood, commenting on the warmth of the heat or glow of the flames. Or perhaps you are noticing the damp grass around the fire.

Anyway, that is a kind of time that you get when in the same class as someone. In this column, I have tried to affect it. But our best conversations are not when we ask the other person to explain what they wrote, as if we each wrote something behind a shroud only to pull it back for the other person. Our best conversations are when the ideas from our writing are there in the background, then in the foreground, coming and going to the rhythms of our thoughts.

As far as I know, plenty of people have Joes in their lives, who are great friends. Anyone will be lucky to find a Joe sometime in their life.