20. Madrid: 6th Philosophical Meeting (4 pgs.)

ACT I - CHAPTER 20

6th PHILOSOPHICAL MEETING

MADRID

Saturday March 3, 2018

Madrid Spain

The Club Los Caballeros de Madrid, leader of the European Cup, had beaten them two to zero in the first half of the game at the Alfonso Bernabeu Stadium of Madrid.

They managed to tie, but they needed to win to not be left out of the championship. With five minutes left in the game Alexandre saw a long rebound from a defender that Jiménez, who was the midfielder who had replaced Ronald, received, and he touched a pass.

“Duval receives the ball in the center from Jiménez, it’s mark by five, Duval lifts the ball, makes a feint, makes another, leaves them behind, advances through the middle, there goes the football philosopher, he is going to play for Reynam … but no! He goes on! Leave another player in the way! He is alone in front of the goal! The goalkeeper comes out to bail! Hit the ball! Perfect hat! Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal! Duval does it again! The perfect hat after a race of precision and cold blood! Long live the philosopher! Long live Alexandre Duval! Today I become a philosopher! Today I celebrate life! Give me a philosophy book! What pride for the Reyes of Barcelona! The players can’t stop celebrating! Wow what a goal!” the most famous sports journalist in Spain exploded in his account of the game.

Victoria was sitting at her parents’ house in Cambridge celebrating the goal.

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“I love him mom, but I don’t want anything bad to happen to him!”

“What can happen to him daughter, he is fine and France qualified for the World Cup and so do we. Everything is perfect,” said her mother.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do if the final is between France and England, I would divide myself in two,” said Victoria.

“There are still more than four months left, so relax,” his mother added.

“What a goal you scored Alexandre! I hope the World Cup final is not between France and Spain,” Jiménez told him in the locker room.

“Nor I.”

When the team returned to the hotel, Alexandre looked for Yellow, who gave him a ride in the same car that had saved his life. They reached a tall wrought iron gate that opened and they entered a cobblestone courtyard.

“Where we are?”

“In the neighborhood of Los Alerces from the San Martín district in Madrid. This palace belongs to a friend of Mr. Walker.”

“Alexandre! What a goal you scored! It reminded me of the goal of the century I scored in Buenos Aires! It was very similar! Do you know that now everyone talks about philosophy? Did you hear the journalist?” Arturo asked him when he received it.

“No.”

“I want to learn philosophy!” he screamed like crazy.

“I didn’t hear it.”

“You have to listen to it. It’s fun. He went completely crazy. Everyone is talking about it.”

“Hello Alexandre,” Ricardo greeted him.

“Hello.”

Before starting the meeting, Ricardo told them that Francisca’s father had been shot on a trip to Australia, but that he was fine. The same day they blocked Ricardo’s credit cards and, also that same day, the leaders of the club that Arturo ran in Dubai warned him that they did not want him to disconnect his cell phone one weekend a month, which was what he did in the meetings to write the book.

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While they were discussing what was happening, Yellow appeared with some glasses and a bottle of champagne. He opened it, poured the glasses and left.

“Let’s drink to the philosopher’s goal!” Arturo said raising his glass, they toasted and he asked, “What will we study about philosophy today?” and he saw that Alexandre turned on the recorder and left a card on the table with a question. Who am I?

“Who am I?” Arturo read the card aloud—. “I am God,” he joked, bursting into laughter, and they were infected with laughter as well.

They spent almost two hours discussing various topics among which was the concept “value” that derived from the concept “life”, something that was not easy to understand right away. But the bombing of Mr. Walker’s plane, the attempted murder when he had been shot in the car, and the parachute jump all had to do with death.

“After jumping with a parachute, even though we could be dead, aren’t we alive?” Alexandre asked.

“But that’s obvious, what’s new about it?” Arturo asked.

“That the concept “value” refers to the value of life that is only appreciated in contrast to death. An immortal, lacks values, because his life never ends,” Alexandre responded.

They came to the conclusion that, just as Homer’s Achilles said, the gods envied man because he was mortal. They understood that it was death that produced the contrast necessary to value life because, without contrast, nothing was perceived at all. Alexandre knew it, and had experienced it in his body when he had parachuted.

Man’s survival instinct was automatic, but connecting the concepts of death and life was not automatic. Connecting these with value and reason was not automatic either, but rather a personal decision that in any case had absolute consequences that generated very different states of consciousness.

They realized that all people were biologically alive, but not all were mentally alive, that is, they were not really fulfilled men, because they had not yet discovered that their reason was their main value.

Later, Ricardo told them that Francisca read the summaries of the meetings and made very interesting contributions. He considered her a genius.

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She had suggested the metaphor of a king swan to represent a rational brain that chose to think for itself. “The sovereign of the brain” she had told him. She had come up with, unlike Aesop’s fable of the goose, a fable of a swan that defended itself against the farmer and kept the gold. The peasant represented the irrational nature of culture and the gold represented true self-esteem.

Before leaving they were talking about these and other things, playing pool and drinking champagne. They celebrated the simple fact of being alive, not only in their bodies, but also in their minds, because in writing the book, they were choosing to discover why their reason was a value. They were free to focus their minds or not, to choose to think or not, and they knew they were choosing the right thing.

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