“That’s not true. You want to have him killed and I say we lose through violence. I’m no traitor to myself—or you. You can be traitor to justice.”
“Let’s not say anything about justice, when we’re fighting tyranny.”
I recalled days with Aesop and said:
“I wish he was here, to advise us or hear our problems. I think I know what he’d say.”
“What?”
“There’s a way out of slavery... I didn’t kill my master.”
Slavery—there are all kinds.
It is a kind of slavery to long for Phaon and another kind to remember Aesop and another to hope. Perhaps Aesop would rebuke such thinking and say: Slavery is not in ourselves but in the misused power of others. Surely that is the commoner kind but I find slavery in myself and my girls and my island and my books.
Well, here is a story Phaon told me:
“Years ago, a slave broke into a temple on a deserted island and found lamps burning. On a rug lay a naked man, asleep. He’d been lying there for centuries, guarded by someone, the lamps filled and the wicks new.