Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
I smugly went to find Keates’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” thinking how I had understood it when I taught it long ago. My students thought it was about the urn. I knew that wasn’t it at all. My teachers had told me it wasn’t about the urn... but now I see that they nor I got it then... How could we? I was young as they were even younger. I loved the images of life on the urn, the gods and mortals, the dancing and playing, the loving...
I told them what I had been told by my teachers, and what I expected them to tell me back on examination. They told me that beauty is truth, truth beauty... but I didn’t really believe then, nor did they, that our experience would be limited to truth and beauty. Of course, we all thought that couldn’t be all we’d know or need to know, though we didn’t say it to each other. I was an innocent fraud thinking I could trust what I was told; they were gullible, perhaps enchanted by their own youth and mine, and they trusted me to know about truth and beauty. But, alas, now that I have lived, I see that Keates was right.
We went out to Olympia today, not Olympus but the place where the first Olympic games were held three thousand years ago. The patron god of Olympia was Zeus, the god of peace, the most powerful and most important of the gods. Olympia is an appropriate place for a god of peace, just as the high, wild side of Parnassus is a perfect site for Apollo.. The part of Greece where we have spent the last three days is very much like California. There are high mountains that are covered with snow in winter, but in September the plains and mountains are hot.
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