A New Atlantis Adrift
Part 4

Two days later, I was back in the library, trying and failing to keep my mind on my own work, instead thinking about what else I could find out about Atlantis. Dumping my notebook on the table slightly too heavily, possibly waking up one of the other perennial library-dwellers who looked at me accusingly when he had blinked the sleep from his eyes, I wandered into the Ancient History section to see what else I would be able to dig up about legends of the disappeared island. I picked up a few books and filled out my pink slips to leave in their vacated slots.

The pink slips were a wonderful little invention, and could be used in one of the most fun things you could legally do in a library as an undergraduate. There was a form of hide-and-seek game, played using the slips and the inevitable boredom and slight craziness which dissertational research brings. The boredom and craziness is brought on by the institutional mindset that inevitably accompanies any significant amount of time spent in a darkened library. Each pink slip operates as a placeholder for books removed. On the slip, there is room for the title, author, catalogue number and number of the seat where the book will be found if any reader needs it so urgently that they are prepared to wander over and ask to borrow it.

Library hide-and-seek involves setting a number of these pink slips all over the empty slots on shelves, leading people around in a treasure hunt style until they have either gone out of their minds, or they find their little gift: the book they wanted in the first place. It's not much fun to play, especially when you have an essay deadline coming up, but it's certainly fun to set the game in motion for someone else.

Some time later, after returning my books and considering setting a pink slip treasure hunt (but dismissing it on the grounds that I am apparently 'mature' now), I had some more notes. Dating from approximately 2200 BC, the Minoan civilisation had existed on the island on Santorini (70 miles north of Crete, also known as Thera or Thira) in the Aegean, where they enjoyed a great and peaceful culture until they fell to a volcanic eruption of a greater intensity than Krakatoa. This led to tsunamis and earthquakes of a scale to devastate the Minoans, in approximately 1470 BC. To add invasion to injury, the Greeks then conquered them. I suppose that the lesson to be learned is that you should beware Greeks bearing spears, large shields and walking in military formations. The lesson to be learned for me was to quit this and either do the work I was there to do, or quit early for the day and go home to surprise Bel with a nice dinner. As always, the nice dinner won by several furlongs.

I was by the oven (my mother never ever referred to it that way, preferring the word 'stove' – it was one of the first ways in which Bel changed me, getting me to change the way I refer to an oven), stirring the stew when a thought occurred to me about how I could change the way that I was looking at the whole problem. I realised that I hadn't mind-mapped the scraps and fragments of things that were nearly partial morsels of knowledge into anything that vaguely resembled anything structural or orderly. I was taking it too seriously when I was reading, but not seriously at all when I was scribbling it all down in my book; as though it was an earnest endeavour until the point when I needed to recognise it as such, whereupon I treated it as trivial. I couldn't make my mind up whether I cared enough to give it the full attention I still didn't know it deserved.

The doorbell's ring broke me from my non-Platonic philosophies and I went to answer the door to Bel.

"I can't find my keys."
"You've left them in your office or in the black hole that is your handbag."
"Probably. What's that smell?"
"That is the smell of freedom. Either that, or it's my beef stew."
"You've cooked? Is it my birthday already?"
"No. You've already had three birthdays this year. A fourth would be greedy."
"So what's the occasion?"
"I just wanted to have stew tonight, and I thought that it would be petty and rude to make you eat salad while I enjoyed my stew."
"And how right you are. There is a time for salad and a time for wine-marinated cow products."
"It defies belief for me that you don't write menus for a living. 'Wine-marinated cow' could surely grace the tables of any Michelin-starred restaurant."
"Just because you're cooking stew doesn't mean that I won't hurt you in ways unimaginable."
"I'll get back to the stove."
"Oven."
"Okay."

My patented and world-famous beef stew takes approximately four hours to cook and can only be cooked on a gas oven. Electric ovens are terrible for the style of cooking which I espouse, principally because they cannot be adjusted quickly enough to allow for the various whims which come over me when I are preparing a meal. If I suddenly decide that the entire meal does not have enough 'oomphh' or 'guts', then I will want to 'blitz' everything on a very high heat for just as long as I see fit. Gas hobs allow me to do this, electric ones do not. It's all to do with my capricious nature.

"How much longer?"
"About an hour or so. Are you hungry now?"
"I can wait. Is there wine?"
"It's by the bookshelf. We'll need to get another bottle, though."
"Okay."

The minutiae of evening conversation still hadn't dulled for me. Although Bel and I were capable of talking about some fairly elevated thinking, embracing schools of thought or intellectual concepts and then playing with them until we had exhausted our arguments, and then starting all over again for the sake of arguing, I still enjoyed that we could flick between the astral and the mundane as easily as changing a record. It reassured me that we were neither as boring as we feared we were, nor as pretentious as we feared we might become. The charge of pretension was on fairly good ground considering our discussions of the Timaeus dialogue, but I liked to think that our mutual love of stew kept us grounded.

A New Atlantis Adrift
Part 3

Drying up the last night's dishes seemed appropriate the next day, when I continued to learn more about the once great civilisation of Atlantis condemned to its submerged city shrine. Inconsistencies in the accounts of Plato's source, and within his own dialogues, seemed to lead to some intriguing questions. In Timaeus, Atlantis was a prosperous nation, seeking to expand its dominion across the world, an empire whose folly was to desire the subjugation of Greece to Atlantean will. After being engaged and defeated by the Greeks, Atlantis suffered the further ignominy of natural disaster: earthquakes and floods ravaged their home, causing it to sink and so be destroyed.

So far, so cheery. However, the footnotes on Timaeus, despite their very small italic type, pointed me towards the Critias dialogue in which Plato provided a different reason for the destruction. Atlantis was again an island city of beauty, peace and wisdom for centuries, except now it was not the warlike nature of its inhabitants, but rather their decadence, greed and complacency which led to their end. Zeus, seeing what I suppose can only be described as lazy old smugness, was angered by them, and decided to destroy Poseidon's city (where did he come from?). Which he did, so they're not around any more, et cetera.

Cross-referencing didn't get me very far other than half-understanding the purpose of changing the reasons for Atlantis' destruction. I still didn't understand whether it was the reason which had been altered or the city which had been invented to serve two similar but divergent oratorical purposes. I called it a day even though it had only been half, called Annabel and went to the pub.

I met her when we both took summer jobs at a library and she was the only female there under the age of seven hundred. It also helped that she looked like precisely the sort of person who would instantly disobey any request to keep quiet in the reference section, and would hopefully do naughty things to me behind the tall, sturdy-backed large print bookcase. I don't think that we made an instant connection, and I'm not sure of the precise moment when she stopped laughing with reserve and began laughing with inside knowledge, but I wish that I could remember it, because I'm sure that it changed my life. We moved in together after the first six months and we've been together for just over two years (second anniversary dinner: a gastropub called The Bookseller. I thought she'd laugh; she did).

We found a small house with two bedrooms and decided to convert one of the rooms into what we rather grandiosely called 'the study'. What this meant was that we stacked the boxes and boxes of books we both owned in there for a few months, cutting the packing tape and extracting the books only as we needed them, spilling hardbacks and paperbacks across the very small, very horrible brown-carpeted floor as we did so. It was only when Annabel bullied me into spending a long weekend with my cousin putting up shelves that we finally brought the room from chaos into any form of wall-bracketed order.

I think that one very drunken night a month or so ago I asked her to marry me. I can't fully remember because we had been celebrating (based on a spurious reason, like Merry Tuesday or the like) but I'm fairly sure that I said something along the lines of marrying or engaging or the rest of life together or something idiotic like that. Annabel hasn't mentioned it since and I'm not going to bring it up because I can't remember her reaction to what I may not have even said. We've been going out and carrying on as normal.

"Bunking off?"
"Thirsty."
"That's a definite yes. Hang on a sec while I get a drink."
"Sure."

While she was at the bar, I tried in vain to understand one of the many clues still blank in the crossword grid: 'Someone unable to comprehend an erroneous description of Pandora's box? (2-5)'. Although somebody in some place was feeling very clever with himself, no doubt, for solving this, I was nowhere near a place where a solution was even in sight. Even after the amount of time we had spent together, I still hated to admit to myself that Bel was far better at solving cryptic clues than I was.

She combined library work with teaching and, as such, had a far more analytical mind than I. She also got a better degree than I did, a fact which she enjoys to bring up in any possible situation where I am being intellectually arrogant or, indeed, arrogant in any one of several natures. Possibly the best demonstration of her mental superiority is the fact that I continue to argue with her, despite the beatings I receive on a regular basis.

"So have you solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle?"
"No, and you'll be pleased to know that I'm cooling on the idea."
"Well, that is good news."
"But I'm getting nowhere with working out what the implications of the Timaeus reference lead to."
"And yet you still haven't given up."
"No."
"Why do you still attempt The Times crossword, even though you know that you are a bear of very little brain?"
"Because hope is important."
"And yet so misplaced, in your case."
"You, of course, are able to complete this grid with correct letters in a matter of moments, right?"
"I'm so glad that you haven't made me say it myself."
"So try nine across."
"Okay. Hmmm … no-hoper."
"So you admit defeat?"
"No, Cro-Magnon man. 'No-hoper' is the solution. Would you like me to remind you of this moment repeatedly in the future, or would you prefer to concede my infinite power over you now?"
"I'll take a little from column A and a little from column B."
"Clever boy. You learn so slowly, but maybe you have a future after all. This future will, of course, depend on whether you have bought the ingredients I emailed to you earlier. The raspberries are the deal-breaker."
"Look in the carrier bag at my feet and you will find that I have yet again passed your tests."
"Then tonight you will eat dessert."

While she sat there, inking in the remaining squares with answers I wouldn't check in front of her – but had in the past checked the next day against the approved solution, only to find that Annabel had been completely correct – I wondered whether this was merely an indulgence of mine to look for anything relating to Atlantis (opening my own Pandora's box) or if I was genuinely touching on something new, a thought that had not yet been thought by one of the great minds and that was waiting for a discoverer, a Magellan of folklore and legend.

"Stop thinking about it."
"I was just wondering whether I was barking up the wrong tree."
"Not so much barking up the wrong tree, as simply barking."
"Well, I didn't see that little witticism coming from a mile off."
"I just work with what you give me."
"Such as raspberries."
"Much more of that, and the supermarket will be closest you'll get to those raspberries."
"I'll concede that point. Now finish the drink, we'll have one more and then go home and have dinner."
"Agreed."

A New Atlantis Adrift
Part 2

Sitting back at home that evening, I went through my notes on forms, space, time and geometry – the aforementioned notes presenting an easy way to spend a full day worsening my already poor eyesight – and tried to make some sense of them. According to Plato, the physical world must be tangible and visible, having bodily form composed of the elements of fire and earth. Fire and earth must be combined, so creating two intermediate elements: air and water.

The particles of these elements, or rather the design of these particles, are based on two atomic triangles, one isosceles, and the other scalene, which can interconnect to form elements. For example, a particle of fire would be described as a tetrahedron consisting of 24 scalene atomic triangles in total. In effect, the base parts of the cosmos, the four elements, are all reducible to triangles. Triangles can be altered in their shape or altered in size, but the form of their triangularity (a new word for me) cannot be changed. Just to screw with my mind, Plato added a fifth element, quintessence. I can't remember how this relates to triangles but I am fairly sure he worked them in somewhere. My first reaction to reading my notes was to wonder how Annabel had gone so completely insane that she had decided to read this for pleasure.

The dialogue she had read also mentioned Atlantis, the fabled city lost beneath the ocean, or for those with a penchant for drama through capitalisation, The Lost City Of Atlantis. This cleared up why there was a note with Timaeus written on it nestling in the pages of my obscure Helder-Ostern book. Apparently, Plato had used Atlantis as some kind of utopian device for the dialogue – Annabel took great joy in pointing out that Plato predated St Thomas More, mainly because she knew I couldn't resist the bait – basing it on an Egyptian story heard by Solon on his travels and passed from him to Plato.

In the 'nut-job' section of my notes, I had seen that someone named Cayce had already wandered through this line of reasoning before, taking Atlantis and Plato's elements to the next level, positing that Atlantis had been a real civilisation, located near the island of Bimini (Bel made me check that it wasn't the island of Bikini), where the level of technology had been advanced for its time. The Atlanteans used 'fire crystals' as a source of energy, but there had been an accident and these fire crystals had caused the city to sink beneath the waves, their knowledge and advancement lost forever. The island of Bimini, according to the only map in the library (a surprisingly detailed Ladybird edition), is located really rather near Bermuda. Unlike the quintessence, I could remember how Bermuda related to triangles.

Annabel came into the study making ghost noises, waggling her arms about for some no doubt hilarious reason, and asked how my 'waste of time' reading was going, while getting herself comfortable in a potentially ominous fashion.

"Now that I've solved the mysteries of the Bermuda triangle and Atlantis in the course of one day at the library, without spending any money on photocopying, I've decided that I must be a god and therefore you should worship me."
"Would your Deityness care to go into the kitchen to see last night's plates and cutlery offering you prayers? Wash away their sin, O benevolent one."
"You do know that you'll go to Hell for that, don't you?"
"I didn't realise that the Church of the Shortly To Be Single Man had a theory on Hell."
"Yes, we do, and I am currently in it."
"Well, you can absolve yourself through cleansing. And especially through cleansing the casserole dish."

While washing up, I talked Annabel through what I had found out, and confessed that I was actually quite interested and might try to dig a little further.

"You have a week before term starts and you want to do Indiana Jones work? Is that right? Shall I go shopping for a hat and a whip? Don't answer the second part."
I just think that there's something there."
"Yes, there is an awful lot in the Bermuda triangle. And I don't particularly want to have to explain to my mother that my boyfriend wandered in there and is lost forever. I've used that excuse about two ex-boyfriends already."
"I thought you said that you had put them before a firing squad."
"I like to vary the excuses; it entertains her."
"It's not as though it will take up much time. My teaching notes are practically finished and I can make up the rest."
"Spoken like a true academic."
"You know what I mean."
"Well, if you're prepared to put this research ahead of your students' learning…"
"You see? I knew you'd understand."
"Me not understand. Boyfriend go crazy in head. Girlfriend force him prepare for term. Right, I'll start the drying up."

A New Atlantis Adrift
Part 1

"If there is a place, a New Atlantis, which can be reached through sailing a ship through great winds and fearsome adventure, then I have not seen it and I have never burned my soles on its searing sands. If there is a man there to speak of low thrones richly adorned and pastoral cedar staffs, then I have not spoken to him or heard his loud Spanish words. Although I read much and have much reading left to do, there is no New Atlantis for me, and the old one lies deep beneath waters I cannot brave."
(Karsten Helder-Ostern, Ein Neu Atlantis Hilflos, 1761)

I went from the fourth floor of the library back down to my seat carrying more books that one person should reasonably expect to balance in the crook of his arm. As I sat down, the topmost book slipped off the pile and when I picked it up, I saw a small scrap of paper had fallen out, with the single word ‘Timaeus' on it. I scribbled the word in my notebook and then replaced the scrap in the back of the book and continued my work for several more hours before I saw that it was dark outside and therefore time to leave.

When I got home, I was pleased to see that Annabel had already returned, unpacking her bag onto our new old wooden table, which we had rescued from the dump at the weekend. I dropped my satchel onto the floor, struggled out of my wet overcoat and wandered into the kitchen in search of wine. Seeing her settle onto the sofa, tuck her legs under her and fluff up the cushions, I readied myself for a lecture.

Her brother already knows this, and so do I, but very few other people notice that when Annabel has a point to make, however brief or verbose, she will spend an amazing amount of time making herself comfortable before delivering her opinion. They usually mistake her activity as a breath-pause, a momentary substitute for speech that allows her to gather her thoughts into a rational or persuasive order before commencing. Paul and I know better; we know that she has already marshalled all her arguments and is simply settling in, ready to be heard, like a presiding judge in a very long case. It's possible that she wants people to think that she doesn't know her mind yet, giving them false hope that their case will be won. She certainly fooled me like that in the beginning, before I wised up to her trick, if it even is one.

I wandered back into the living room, with my wine in a tumbler rather than a proper glass, a habit I had picked up from Annabel.

"What was today like, Bel?"
"I've been considering some of the works of the philosopher Plato."
"Very grand. Would you like a medal?"
"Yes, please, but not right now. I've been reading Plato and I've concluded that he is one of the most boring writers ever to exist, ever."
"Two evers."
"That's how boring he is."
"Who else is in contention for this high accolade?"
"At the moment, it's between Plato, the person who writes car insurance adverts and you."
"I'm flattered."
"Don't be."

Her certainty is simultaneously her most attractive feature and her most frustrating. Annabel hates dithering and so makes a point to check her facts, particularly disliking the question ‘Are you sure?' after she has answered something. As I know this, I make a particular point to ask her whether she is sure at any given moment of the day, secure in the knowledge that these three little words are guaranteed to start her on a tirade. When her answers stray from fact into opinion, however, I'm in slightly safer territory.

"So, you've read the entirety of Plato's works, in one day, and believe that your insightful commentary and knowledge of Greek philosophy is sufficient to pronounce him one of the most boring writers ever ever."
"That's it, yes."
"Can I ask what you base this on?"
"On the fact that he is surrounded by yes men and that he only speaks in very long paragraphs."
"Bel, you speak in long paragraphs as well, and I qualify as a yes man, so that makes you as boring as Plato, at the very least. Do you want some wine?"
"Shut up and yes, in that order. I've been reading Timaeus, and the only thing I got from it is that Greece is probably a bad place to go on holiday if you don't like being chatty. We're going to Cornwall again this year."
"Say that again."
"We're going to Cornwall this year. Ask your parents when we can use the cottage."
"No, the other bit."
"Not liking being chatty?"
"Before that."
"I was reading Plato."
"After that."
"Timaeus."
"Why did you pick that one?"
"Because I read The Republic at college and that was the only other one they had, apart from Parmenides, which I thought was something like parmesan, and especially as I wasn't supposed to be looking at Plato at all. His relevance to my area is somewhere between thin and none."
"That's bizarre."
"Why?"
"Because there was a note today in one of my research books."
"A note about Timaeus?"
"Not about it. That was the only word on the note."
"Haven't you grown out of passing round love notes in class? Who's the other woman?"
"It was in a book I ordered a few weeks ago, for bibliography references to confuse people who get my reading list. I wasn't even going to read it properly. Don't tell my students that."
"Which book?"
"Ein Neu Atlantis Hilflos."
"You don't speak German. Are you showing off again?"
"It's parallel text. It means A New Atlantis Adrift."
"And why on earth did you pick something like that to quote unquote not read properly, which, by the way, I shall be telling all your students as soon as I have the time to print it on a very large banner?"
"To see who reads the reading list. I'll get you a glass of wine."

I was not particularly surprised that Annabel would read Plato (she is, after all, clearly more literate and intelligent than I am), but I was surprised that she should pick that book on the same day that a note in an obscure German text should fall out and provide exactly the same name. The next day, I went to the library with a more focused mission, to learn more about this book.

Mapmaker
There is a small, metallic-covered map in Sam's wallet and he is fumbling in the bright, cold morning to extricate it from all the receipts he keeps for no reason. His chill-bitten hands are trying to separate the magnetised map covers to show something readable, squinting down at it as he turns round and round to provide a break from the wind.

There is little time before his meeting and he is lost. London is unusual for him, a place where some stations nestle together within walking distance, where ten minutes by foot will pass three or more chances to go underground. Buses with numbers and names not on his map are passing and stopping, seemingly arbitrarily, jealously guarding their routes through confusingly coloured and differing maps in shelters, with contradictory instructions and warnings.

The small map now open in his hands befuddles him, as the names of places he has passed start to blur in his memory and become new names, new places. Parks and streets and gates and crosses are changing their names in his mind, and he closes his eyes tightly to try and make street signs clearer in his recollection. Instead he sees only lines, intersecting and turning, red crossing light blue with greens and yellows enveloping them all.

Every road is now a high street, every change of direction turning into a square or crescent, with cul-de-sacs and T-junctions swimming around, forming a moving, living map where streets change their location to walk around a two-dimensional grid until they discover a new home. Rail lines and road signs change names and meanings across zones which are no longer where they were.

Sam feels adrift in this new map of London, with tube stations swapping places, following their lines around and exchanging places as easily as trading baseball cards. One-way streets change direction and no through roads in Vauxhall become Cheapside alleyways. There is a free-for-all in the A-Z, as though the alphabet was being rewritten by the letters themselves.

He pauses for a moment, opens his eyes and sees that the streets are where they were, as they were. The melée inside him is greeted by a lack of the extraordinary, a routine day playing out like any other with car horns and screeches of brakes interrupting the low buzz of far-heard chatter. He refolds his map. He closes his eyes.

He stands intentionally sightless, and the city evolves itself in a cartographic chaos behind his eyes. He is tapped on the shoulder.

"Have you been waiting long?"