the pagan with the Christian, and find some respite from the barbarian raids.
  The Roman Senate still existed. Of all institutions it had survived
  And a scholar, sprung from the same stock as myself, Boethius, a very learned man who 
studied the ancients and the saints, had recently been put to death, but not before he 
had given us a great book. You can find it in any library today. It is, of course, The 
Consolation of Philosophy.
  I had to see the ruined Forum for myself, the burnt and barren hills of Rome, the pigs 
and goats roaming where once Cicero had spoken to the crowds. I had to see the forsaken 
poor living desperately along the banks of the Tiber.
  I had to see the fallen classical world. I had to see the Christian churches and 
shrines.
  I had to see one scholar in particular. Like Boethius he had come from old Roman stock, 
and like Boethius he had read the classics and the saints. He was a man who wrote letters 
that went all over the world, even as far as to the scholar Bede in England.
  And he had built a monastery there, some great flare of creativity and optimism, in 
spite of ruin and war.
  This man was of course the scholar Cassiodorus, and his monastery lay at the very tip 
of the boot of Italy, in the paradisal land of green Calabria.
  I came upon it in early evening, as I planned, when it looked like a great and splendid 
lighted little city.
  Its monks were copying away ferociously in the Scriptorium.
  And there in his cell, wide open to the night, sat Cassiodorus himself, at his writing, 
a man past ninety years of age.
  He had survived the barbarian politics that doomed his friend Boethius, having served 
the Aryan Ostrogoth Emperor Theodoric, having lived to retire from Civil Service - he had 
survived to build this monastery, his dream, and to write to monks all over the world, to 
share what he knew with them of the ancients, to conserve the wisdom of the Greeks and 
the Romans.
  Was he truly the last man of the ancient world, as some have said? The last man who 
could read both Latin and Greek? The last man who could treasure both Aristotle and the 
dogma of the Roman Pope'? Plato and Saint Paul?
  I didn't know then that he would be so well remembered, And I didn't know how soon he'd 
be forgotten!
  Vivarium, on its mountain slopes, was an architectural triumph. It had its sparkling 
ponds to catch and hold fish - the characteristic which gave it its name. It had its 
Christian church with the inevitable cross, its dormitories, its rooms for the weary 
guest traveler. Its library was rich in the classics of my time, as well as gospels which 
have now been lost. The monastery was rich in all the fruits of the field, all crops 
needed for food, trees laden with fruit, fields of wheat.
  The monks cared for all of this, and they dedicated themselves to copying books day and 
night in their long Scriptorium.
  There were beehives there, on this gentle moon-lighted coast, hundreds of beehives from 
which the monks harvested honey to eat, and wax for sacred candles, and royal jelly for 
an ointment. The bee-hives covered a hill as big as the orchard or the farmland of 
Vivarium.
  I spied on Cassiodorus. I walked among the bee-hives, and marveled as I always do at 
the inexplicable organization of bees, for the mysteries of the bees and their dance and 
their hunting for pollen and their breeding was all known to my eye long before it was 
understood by the human world.
  As I left the hives, as I moved array towards the distant beacon of Cassiodorus's lamp, 
I looked back. I beheld something.
  Something collected itself from the hives, something immense and invisible and forceful 
that I could both feel and hear. I was not gripped by fear, merely sparked by a temporary 
hope that some New Thing had come into the world. For I am not a seer of ghosts and never 
was.
  This force rose out of the very bees themselves, out of their intricate knowledge and 
their countless sublime patterns, as though they had somehow accidentally evolved it, or 
empowered it with consciousness through the means of their endless creativity, 
meticulousness and endurance.
  It was like an old Roman woodland spirit of the forest.
  I saw this force fly loosely over the fields. I saw it enter the body of a straw man 
who stood in the fields, a scarecrow which the monks had made with a fine round wooden 
head, painted eyes, crude nose and smiling mouth - a creature whole and entire who could 
be moved from time to time, intact in his monk's hood and robe.
  I saw this scarecrow, this man of straw and wood hurry whirling and dancing through the 
fields and the vineyards until he had reached Cassiodorus's cell.
  I followed!
  Then I heard a silent wail rise from the being. I heard it and I saw the scarecrow in a 
bending, bowing dance of sorrow, its bundled straw hands over ears it didn't have. It 
writhed with grief.
  Cassiodorus was dead. He had died quietly within his lamp-lighted cell, his door open, 
at his writing table. He lay, gray-haired, ancient, quiet against his manuscript. He had 
lived over ninety years. And he was dead.
  This creature, this scarecrow, was wild with suffering and grief, rocking and moaning, 
though it was a sound no human could have heard.
  I who have never seen spirits stared at it in wonder. Then it perceived that I was 
there. It turned. He - for so it seemed in this ragged attire and body of straw - reached 
out to me. He flung out his straw arms. The straw fell from his sleeves. His wooden head 
wobbled on the pole that was his spine. He - It - implored me: he begged me for the 
answer to the greatest questions humans and immortal have ever posed. He looked to me for 
answers!
  Then glancing back again at the dead Cassiodorus, he ran to me, across the sloping 
grass, and the need came out of him, poured from him, his arms out as it beheld me. Could 
I not explain? Could I not contain in some Divine Design the mystery of the loss of 
Cassiodorus! Cassiodorus who had with his Vivarium rivaled the hive of bees in elegance 
and glory! It was Vivarium which had drawn this consciousness together from the hives! 
Could I not ease this creature's pain!
  "There are horrors in this world," I whispered. "It is made up of mystery and dependent 
upon mystery. If you would have peace, go back to the hives; lose your human shape, and 
descend again, fragmented into the mindless life of the contented bees from which you 
rose."
  He was fixed, and he listened to me.
  "If you would have fleshly life, human life, hard life which can move through time and 
space, then fight for it. If you would have human philosophy then struggle and make 
yourself wise, so that nothing can hurt you ever. Wisdom is strength. Collect yourself, 
whatever you are, into something with a purpose.
  "But know this. All is speculation under the sky. All myth, all religion, all 
philosophy, all history - is lies."
  The thing, whether it be male or female, drew up its bundled straw hands, as if to 
cover its mouth. I turned my back on it.