A Eulogy for The Garneau Pub

I used to derive great pleasure from long nights of eating and drinking and talking. It was best with lovers of wisdom. The plague put a stop to my awful little pub.

“Plato’s Pizza” actually existed in Edmonton, Alberta. I could not believe my luck. The Dionysus to its Apollo was the adjacent “Garneau Pub.” It was amazing: a sort of literalization of early, Schopenhauer and Wagner drunk Nietzsche—you know, the sort of thing one produces under the sway of pessimism and mythical heroes—in The Birth of Tragedy: “To reach a closer understanding of both these tendencies, let us begin by viewing them as the separate art realms of dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward one another in much the same relationship as the Apollinian and Dionysian.”

I squandered many nights in the company of the ancient, Greek proprietors of these seedy establishments with improbably compelling names.

I learned one, invaluable lesson:

If you cannot empathize, you cannot become wise.

You’ll forgive the fromage, I hope. It didn’t have to rhyme, but it might be a happy accident that it did.

Wisdom, to keep the spirit of that place, and places like it scattered throughout the present and the past--they may not have much of a future--alive

Is knowing that you know nothing

That is, given all that there is to be known, you can never know everything.

But you can try. All of the time.

Everyone should be approached as someone from whom you have something valuable to learn.

Counterexamples can be very edifying.

People who abhor academics and intellectuals until one has a beer with them and takes an interest in their stories.

People whom most careerist academics do not socialize with or listen to very carefully.

If you can imagine what it is like to be such a person, i.e., a person who finds the sort of person you are abhorrent, but overlooks that when you begin to exchange stories with him or her or them

When, in other words, you allow the other party to be both the narrator and the protagonist of a tale that, should you show an interest in listening to and understanding it, will disclose a way of being to you that was formerly beyond your ken

The better to remind you that you know nothing

Because the world is this vast and variegated and voluptuous

You might not acquire much in the way of knowledge that is useful for your work

But you will come to respect the capacity of other forms of work

To allow you to become wise

And that ought to be the point

The whole point of being human

May be becoming wiser

Concerning ways of being human

The better to encourage others

To do the same

All of the time

The better to govern wisely

As one of the people

Who collectively constitute a democracy

Which ought to be the will of the people

Made law

It is all invisibly obvious

You will come to empathize with a great many humans, some of whom would be beyond your grasp

If you didn’t go looking for places with improbable names

And Ancient Greek proprietors

To drink beer and shoot the shit in

You will become a wiser citizen

You will know that you know nothing

About citizens with whom you empathize

Because they have listened to your stories

And you to theirs

Not as objects of cold, theoretical analysis

But evidence that you are the architect and engineer of a story

And the character within it who does the most to shape the plot

Through thought, word and deed

Is you, hero

You are my sibling

No matter the folly of our parents

And this polis ought to behave as I am moved to behave

And you are moved to behave

Once we have told our tales

And listened well

You will not be dehumanized or allow me to be

You will get what is coming to a human being and so will I

In a society governed by the many

Not the few

The many

Who know what you don’t

And make you wiser

Because they will not let you forget

That you know nothing

My pub was killed by the plague

Too many were

Especially given what the plague has wrought

We should all waste an evening some time

Making each other wiser