Gwenda-lin Grewal: The World As Seen From A Balloon

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Antiquity didn’t have an ivory tower, but it did have a balloon. Aristophanes was its maker, Socrates its passenger. In a balloon, Socrates floated above the crowd, looking from the sky rather than the ground. He didn’t seem to be afraid of heights, like many people are nowadays. Fear of heights is another way of talking about the distance you have to pass through to have a conversation. At a moment when virtual writing and speaking aloud have become preferred modes of public talk—whimsical and fleeting though they are—helium is a precious rarity. We skip lightly over the sacred burial ground of the library, desecrating its corpses by resurrecting them in digital form. How is a pen different from a voice? Books are balloons of a certain sort: the sort that might undercut the shortsightedness of being too near a subject or the brainwashing that might ensue when you can’t put an idea back on the shelf. Up high everything looks weird, but come down for too long and you might get popped? Necromancy and writing, towers and balloons—there is a lot to see close up from afar.

Gwenda-lin Grewal is Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language at the New School for Social Research. Her work includes two books, Fashion | Sense (Bloomsbury) and Thinking of Death in Plato’s Euthydemus (Oxford), as well as translations and articles on ancient Greek philosophy and literature. She occasionally writes about pop culture, most recently on Barbie and death for Public Seminar. In addition to teaching, she has been a Blegen Research Fellow, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the American Academy in Rome. She is currently writing a book about chance and fate in Homer and online. www.gwengrewal.com