The
Consolation of Philosophy
COP is a
very thin little book, written in Latin, part rhyming metered poetry and part
prose. The translation I ultimately read
is by H. R. James 1897. This is the
story of how I discovered The Consolation of Philosophy many years ago.
It would
have been sometime around 1992 (I was 34 then) when I was cleaning for the
parents of a friend I had met when I was 21, dropped out of
college and living in Wilmont Apartments.
I did not discover the book in their house but in the neighbors’ house
who also hired me. Both couples were
older and had been retired for several years.
I was cleaning for Brad’s parents because his mother was dying of cancer
of the colon. I had been cleaning for
several months, not realizing how close Mrs. Joyce was to the end of her life,
until a few weeks before she died. Brad and
I were close, I had known him when he was struggling with the mockery of
closeted gay friends in high school. My
roommate, who had been divorced by her parents, yes, that is the way they
framed kicking her out, they said parents could divorce children just like they
can divorce each other, she had been sneaking out in the middle of the night,
skipping school and generally behaving like a teenager that could not wait to
get out in the world so they sent her out into the world! And she got a job at Reader’s Corner and
rented an apartment across the street, with me! I had dropped out of engineering school at
state and was taking a class in Latin, I joked that I was going to be the first
female priest, but dropped the class after a month or so. We were both openly gay and looking to live
with someone who did not find that offensive.
Karen was a
serious musician, a fairly serious student and a very serious partier. She also courted the homecoming queen of her
high school; a young lesbian in love with a straight cheerleader. Brad was one of Karen’s many friends that
spent time at the apartment. We remained
friends after Karen reunited with her parents and went to live with them when
they moved to DC.
Brad was a
dancer and also a very serious student.
He was taking calculus and history classes at State to get a jump on his
college credits. He had been taking
dancing lessons since childhood. I don’t
remember the story of how he got started, maybe through theater, because his
parents though not at all discouraging were a bit mystified at his
passion. Brad had a great sense of humor
about himself and life in general, and no illusions. He had a critical but open mind. I was really shocked one day when he called upset about gay ridicule from a campy closeted fellow student. I had no idea Brad was gay, it didn’t seem to
matter in that crowd, and he just never had shown an interest in romance
anyway.
Face value
MP, face value. If you have private
stuff, so do others. Well that day he
let me in on his private stuff and from then on we were close friends. He got over the ridicule pretty quickly, but
then came out, went to a gay bar and immediately fell in love and was spurned. So there was another heart break, to help put
the forgotten ridicule in perspective.
He was easy to be friends with because he just plunged into his work or
study and churned on through the loss.
I refer to
Brad in the past tense because we have lost touch after so many years and also
I am not using his real name. But back
to his parents. They hired me when Mrs.
Joyce was in the last 6 months of her life.
I was so busy getting to know his Mom and Dad better, catching up on
Brad’s years since going off to college and teaching and grad school, and of course
cleaning the house, that I did not get that Brad’s Mom was going to die
soon. One day when he was talking about
all the research he did on the different types of cancer and how he was
preparing any tempting dish he could think of to coax his Mom into eating, it
dawned on me that she was not going to survive the illness. I asked him about the hope that seemed to
pervade every aspect of the family interactions. There was nothing fake or delusional about
it. They all behaved as though the
struggle to survive was winnable.
He knew
exactly what I meant. We were both
atheists and had no ideas of an afterlife.
There was nothing romantic about the situation. The bad history between the kids was being
churned up and they were bound to slog through it. And the Mom and Dad were two really cool
people. It was going to be a big
loss. The Dad was in the middle of
remodeling a section of the house and Brad said he was having a lot of trouble
concentrating on the tasks. They were
functioning, they were hoping, but they all knew they were on the way to losing
an amazing Mom.
Brad said
when someone is dying you have hope because it is the only way you can keep
going. He said they couldn’t help but
operate as though their Mom would beat the disease. I can’t remember why he thought that was the
case, just that he acknowledged how unrealistic it seemed on the surface. This prompted him to talk about how he wished he could believe in the kind of afterlife that his parents and siblings believed in. He felt left out, but could not relate to their views of heaven or reincarnation. I look back and realize he was articulating how isolated it feels to not share the beliefs held in common by people you love.
I think I
did not start cleaning for the Howards till months after Mrs. Joyce died. I can’t remember. Mrs. Howard was a tiny little retired English
teacher and worked as a volunteer at the local hospital. Early on she told the story of how she, Mrs.
Howard had been picked up and rushed to the hospital with what turned out to be
a brain tumor. I’m not sure if I
remember that right. It was something
very sudden and serious. She said when
she recovered Mrs. Joyce talked about how panicked she was when she saw her
closest friend and next door neighbor being carried off, that she was out of
her mind with the thought that she might never see her friend alive again. Mrs. Howard was turning over the irony of how
things ultimately turned out, that the one in the ambulance would be the one
left behind grieving for her friend.
But Mrs.
Joyce dying was just the most recent loss for Mrs. Howard. Her only son was one of the first people in
the US to die of AIDS. It took a while
before we started talking about that, the story of how she journeyed to the
northern state where he had lived for years, and cared for him in a special
home for the dying. She described
pulling his wheelchair up a set of stairs every night after long days at the
hospital for treatment and falling asleep exhausted. She was never emotional or self pitying, but
she was willing to tell the story.
At the time
I could not understand something that suddenly comes to me. I would read the church bulletin laying on
their porch or kitchen table and feel really angry at some of the propaganda against
homosexuality and the sins of the gay ‘lifestyle’. Mrs. Howard may have finally told the story
of caring for her son when I asked about the bulletin. I never came right out and asked how she
could stand being a member of a church that spoke as they did about gays. I did not feel that I could use the same
language with her that I used among friends.
In the conversations about her son we never used the word gay or
homosexual. The discussion was very
circumspect. But I asked something hoping
maybe the judgments in the bulletin did not reflect the local parish. It pissed me off to think of her surrounded
by people with the opinions outlined in that bulletin.
All I ever
got was the story of caring for her 40 something year old son in the last
months of his life and that she donated flowers to the church every year on the
anniversary of his death. It suddenly
occurs to me that that was her very powerful statement to the
congregation. She was a very positive,
service oriented, modest woman. She was
happiest talking about visits with the new child of a couple very close to the
family. When my son was born and I tried
bringing him to work she played with him and had him laughing so hard I wished
he could be with her every day.
That was so
many years ago, I don’t even know if Mrs. Howard is still alive. I have not kept in touch with Brad, his
family or the Howards.
After their
son had grown and gone off in the world the Howards began sleeping and spending
their leisure time down in the basement where the temperature was most
comfortable. It looked like it would
have been the son’s hang out area as a teen.
He was older than Brad and had gone off to college when Brad was still
young so Brad did not know a whole lot about him. The family library was downstairs and there
were also at least 9 photos of the Howards’ son from infancy to high school,
all in a row showing the changes in his face from youth to adulthood. Boy did I look a lot at those photos.
And of
course I looked at the books. That was
where I found “The Consolation of Philosophy.”
It was a really skinny book. I
took it off the shelf and brought it home with me. I can’t even remember if I asked. I kept it for 6 weeks and brought it back
when it became evident I would not be able to concentrate on it. But I had read enough about Boethius that I
knew he was in prison when he wrote it and was ultimately tortured and
killed. I also got that he was a well
respected official in the government of Theodiric.
It wasn’t
till many years later that I found a translation of COP on the internet, with
plenty of annotations illuminating the unfamiliar cultural references, and I
was finally able to make sense of it.
Boethius is said to have been one of the few Romans of that time who
read and wrote in Greek. He had plans of
writing a work about astrology, which in those days was still a branch of higher
learning even though in popular culture it had been watered down and debased
for centuries. When I had gotten all I
could from astrology books and felt there was still something missing I kept
going back in time, as far back as Ptolemy’s “Tetrabiblos,” and still felt
there was a key waiting to be found.
That key was Consolation of Philosophy.
What COP and
Timeaus (Plato) do that I think a lot of pop astrology misses, is treat time as
the unfolding, or opening out into manifested parts, of unity. Neither Boethius nor Plato ever use the word
astrology or astronomy. They speak of
time as the motion of the planets- as the visible, tangible unfolding of some
first cause that never dies, is unborn, and so inconceivable to us, but never
the less the source of our existence.
They speak of the philosophy of time and so the philosophy of
astrology. The Consolation of Philosophy
became my philosopher’s stone.
It wasn’t
the only book that helped me understand how astrology works, but it was the
first that brought it all together. Eventually there were other ancient works that spoke of time, the
movements of the planets and the unity of existence and I continue to study
them all to deepen that understanding.
The Consolation of Philosophy has a special place for me and I feature
it throughout this blog. I will always
associate it with two very courageous families that stood with quiet dignity behind
their sons when their surrounding communities’ message was to hide in shame. They were good examples for me of how
families make it through really tough times.
They were a lot like Boethius the author of The Consolation of
Philosophy.