I did not always know if the Professor’s excursions with me into the other room were by way of distraction, actual social occasions, or part of his plan. Did he want to find out how I would react to certain ideas embodied in these little statues, or how deeply I felt the dynamic idea still implicit in spite of the fact that ages or aeons of time had flown over many of them? Or did he mean simply to imply that he wanted to share his treasures with me, those tangible shapes before us that yet suggested the intangible and vastly more fascinating treasures of his own mind? Whatever his idea, I wanted then, as at other times, to meet him halfway; I wanted to return, in as unobtrusive a way as possible, the courtesy that was so subtly offered me. If it was a game, a sort of roundabout way of finding out something that perhaps my unconscious guard or censor was anxious to keep from him, well, I would do my best to play this game, this guessing game — or whatever it was. So, as the ivory had held my attention and perhaps (I did not know) it was especially valued by him, as it held the center place on his imposing desk (that seemed placed there, now I come to think of it, almost like a high altar, in the Holy of Holies), I said, realizing my slight aversion to this exquisite work of art, “That ivory — what is it? It’s Indian obviously. It’s very beautiful.”
He said, barely glancing at the lovely object, “It was sent to me by a group of my Indian students.” He added, “On the whole, I think my Indian students have reacted in the least satisfactory way to my teaching.” So much for India, so much for his Indian students. This was not his favorite, this Oriental, passionate, yet cold abstraction. He had chosen something else. It was a smallish object, judging by the place left empty, my end of the semicircle, made by the symmetrical arrangement of the Gods (or the Goods) on his table. “This is my favorite,” he said. He held the object toward me. I took it in my hand. It was a little bronze statue, helmeted, clothed to the foot in carved robe with the upper incised chiton or peplum. One hand was extended as if holding a staff or rod. “She is perfect,” he said, “only she has lost her spear.” I did not say anything. He knew that I loved Greece. He knew that I loved Hellas. I stood looking at Pallas Athené, she whose winged attribute was Niké, Victory, or she stood wingless, Niké A-pteros in the old days, in the little temple to your right as you climb the steps to the Propylaea on the Acropolis at Athens. He too had climbed those steps once, he had told me, for the briefest survey of the glory that was Greece. Niké A-pteros, she was called, the Wingless Victory, for Victory could never, would never fly away from Athens.
52
She has lost her spear. He might have been talking Greek. The beautiful tone of his voice had a way of taking an English phrase or sentence out of its context (out of the associated context, you might say, of the whole language) so that, although he was speaking English without a perceptible trace of accent, yet he was speaking a foreign language. The tone of his voice, the singing quality that so subtly permeated the texture of the spoken word, made that spoken word live in another dimension, or take on another color as if he had dipped the grey web of conventionally woven thought and with it, conventionally spoken thought, into a vat of his own brewing — or held a strip of that thought, ripped from the monotonous faded and outworn texture of the language itself, into the bubbling cauldron of his own mind in order to draw it forth dyed blue or scarlet, a new color to the old grey mesh, a scrap of thought, even a cast-off rag, that would become hereafter a pennant, a standard, a sign again, to indicate a direction or, fluttering aloft on a pole, to lead an army.
And on the other hand, when he said, she is perfect, he meant not only that the little bronze statue was a perfect symbol, made in man’s image (in woman’s, as it happened), to be venerated as a projection of abstract thought, Pallas Athené, born without human or even without divine mother, sprung full-armed from the head of her father, our-father, Zeus, Theus, or God; he meant as well, this little piece of metal you hold in your hand (look at it) is priceless really, it is perfect, a prize, a find of the best period of Greek art, the classic period in its most concrete expression, before it became top-heavy with exterior trappings and ornate detail. This is a perfect specimen of Greek art, produced at the moment when the archaic abstraction became humanized but not yet over-humanized.
“She is perfect,” he said and he meant that the image was of the accepted classic period, Periclean or just pre-Periclean; he meant that there was no scratch or flaw, no dent in the surface or stain on the metal, no fold of the peplum worn down or eroded away. He was speaking as an ardent lover of art and an art-collector. He was speaking in a double sense, it is true, but he was speaking of value, the actual intrinsic value of the piece; like a Jew, he was assessing its worth; the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ran in his veins. He knew his material pound, his pound of flesh, if you will, but this pound of flesh was a pound of spirit between us, something tangible, to be weighed and measured, to be weighed in the balance and — pray God — not to be found wanting!
53
He had said, he had dared to say that the dream had its worth and value in translatable terms, not the dream merely of a Pharaoh or a Pharaoh’s butler, not the dream merely of the favorite child of Israel, not merely Joseph’s dream or Jacob’s dream of a symbolic ladder, not the dream only of the Cumaean Sybil of Italy or the Delphic Priestess of ancient Greece, but the dream of everyone, everywhere. He had dared to say that the dream came from an unexplored depth in man’s consciousness and that this unexplored depth ran like a great stream or ocean underground, and the vast depth of that ocean was the same vast depth that today, as in Joseph’s day, overflowing in man’s small consciousness, produced inspiration, madness, creative idea, or the dregs of the dreariest symptoms of mental unrest and disease. He had dared to say that it was the same ocean of universal consciousness, and even if not stated in so many words, he had dared to imply that this consciousness proclaimed all men one; all nations and races met in the universal world of the dream; and he had dared to say that the dream-symbol could be interpreted; its language, its imagery were common to the whole race, not only of the living but of those ten thousand years dead. The picture-writing, the hieroglyph of the dream, was the common property of the whole race; in the dream, man, as at the beginning of time, spoke a universal language, and man, meeting in the universal understanding of the unconscious or the subconscious, would forgo barriers of time and space, and man, understanding man, would save mankind.