Good afternoon. I am fifty years old and greedy for impressions. Collecting them is my passion; giving them away is nearly as good.
For my wife’s birthday I gave her an ancient theatre. Not the whole thing, obviously. A ticket. At Ephesus—in the very ruins where Romans once sat yawning and discussing who had poisoned whom in the last tragedy. We sat there too. Heat, stone, a full house. Either modern Türkiye or Roman Asia Minor; it was difficult to be sure.
It is a theatre with previous form, incidentally. This is where the silversmiths of Ephesus staged their riot against St Paul, filling all twenty-five thousand seats and chanting Great is Artemis of the Ephesians for a solid two hours, because his preaching was ruining the trade in souvenir shrines. Even then, apparently, the house could be relied on to fill up for a good row.
And so the sun goes down, the sunset over the mountains is the colour of a pomegranate, the marble beneath us is warm as a hammam, and on the stage—Carmina Burana. Live. Thundering, pouring, soaring.
There is a private joke in that, though nobody on stage was making it. The words are thirteenth-century, from a manuscript of goliard songs found in a Bavarian monastery, and the opening chorus is not a hymn to Fortune but a complaint against her: O Fortuna, velut luna—Fortune, changeable as the moon, who lifts you up only to take it all away again. The manuscript even draws her wheel, with a king riding to the top and another sliding off the bottom.
So: a hundred voices at full volume, cursing Fortune for her inconstancy. And one man in the audience thinking that she had, on the whole, been rather decent to him.
It was… magic. I looked at the stage. Then at the sky. Then at my wife. And I understood that at some point everything had converged: antiquity, music, the evening, and she beside me.
All of which was for her. And a little, admittedly, for me—so as to remember that I am a damnably lucky man.
Happy birthday, my love. O Fortuna!
