Death, Family, and Love. Michael H. Mitias
earlier. A rather strange, inscrutable feeling rose in her mind. The sudden transformation she just witnessed defied logical and conceptual comprehension. Frankly, it was unbelievable. She sank into a moment of thoughtfulness, of bafflement, of fear! The feeling of hesitation that crept into her mind as a normal mental state earlier now became a feeling of existential confusion, one that verged on anxiety. She did not respond to the caller’s complimentary remark. She could not! How could she? What kind of response could she have delivered? To whom should she respond—to the impassive, soul-less Don Juan or to the warm, alluring Don Juan? Which one of the two was the real visitor? How could this sudden, instantaneous transformation of personality, of demeanor, take place? How would you, dear reader, act in such a situation? But Dr. Athenaion was a philosopher; she was a keen analyst, not only of ideas but also of human character and human circumstances. She was always disinclined to act hastily or irrationally. But the situation she was in that morning defied logical analysis, much less understanding. She did not respond to the caller, not immediately; she looked at him inquisitively yet critically. The only feeling, not even an idea that crawled into her consciousnesses, was to dismiss him politely and close the door in his face, albeit softly. She couldn’t be part of a vague, irrational, and possibly dangerous encounter. No human being would fault her had she made this decision. But the caller, who knew Dr. Athenaion quite well, to the extent that he was reading her mind throughout this conversation, understood the strangeness as well as the complexity of the situation he had created for her. “There is no need to fear me, Dr. Athenaion,” he suddenly said, “or to worry about your physical or mental wellbeing, fame, power, or profession. I only wish to have a conversation with you. Is this too much to ask?”
“But, first, who are you?” Dr. Athenaion asked, a tinge of seriousness and self-confidence in her voice. “I do not know you! I have the absolute right to know the people I converse with.” Dr. Athenaion did not believe in the existence of non-natural and non-human spirits or spirit-like beings, and yet, what she had witnessed was neither natural nor human. “There are many types of visits. Some are meaningful and some frivolous,” she reasoned. “I am not interested in frivolous ones, they are a waste of time. How can I have a conversation with a person I do not know?” Besides, there was something mysterious, uncanny about him. He was real and unreal, honest and deceptive, human, and un-human at the same time. She surveyed his face again mainly to ascertain whether the man standing at the threshold of her door was a real human being. Again, she hesitated in arriving at a decision.
“I would be happy to tell you who I am, and I would be equally happy to inform you of the purpose of my visit. As far as I know, you’ve never conducted any of your visits or any of your serious conversations at the threshold of your door. I shall be honored if you welcome me into your home the way you welcome all your visitors.” The caller made this request with a friendly, and an objective observer would say alluring, smile. But Dr. Athenaion did not observe this aspect of his request because she was trying to make sense of the caller’s presence at the door of her apartment.
“As far as you know? You seem to presume much, much more than you should,” Dr. Athenaion snapped involuntarily.
“Yes, like other people, people you have not taught and people you have not met personally, know about you. You are a very renowned person, Dr. Athenaion,” The caller emphasized. “You are a highly respected and admired model of a human being.”
“I am not fishing for a compliment.”
“Of that, I am certain. I just wanted to assure you of my serious intentions and the fact that your reputation precedes you everywhere you go.”
Although reluctantly and with a streak of fear in her mind, Dr. Athenaion admitted the caller into her apartment. The living room was adjacent to her study. Before moving to the sofa, where he was expected to sit, her guest stopped at the door of the study and scanned it with curious eyes. “This is where Dr. Athenaion gives birth to her philosophical vision of a human community governed by technocrats, and this is where she converses with the great minds in the history of philosophy.” He nodded, contracted his eyes, and cast a sharp look at a lithograph hanging over a large bookcase. “Hegel, ha?”
“Yes.”
“You admire him?”
“He is a very insightful philosopher. His work is a rich source of ideas and possibilities of new ways of theorizing about the nature of the world and human life.”
“People like him are dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Dr. Athenaion frowned with a palpable feeling of dissatisfaction. “On the contrary, he is one of the most constructive philosophers of all time. His philosophy is the source of most, if not all, the metaphysical and social schools of thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
“What you say is a matter of opinion,” the visitor mumbled as he walked toward the sofa. “How is your work on the project of the development of a human community governed by technocrats going?” The visitor asked as he sat on the right corner of the sofa.
Dr. Athenaion was about to sit in a chair facing her visitor when this question pierced her ears like an arrow of fire. She remained standing and stared at him, anger in her eyes, and a severe frown on her forehead. “He seems to know a great deal about my social standing, which is public knowledge, but about my project and about what I am thinking and how I am feeling?” she thought. “This is impossible! Has he been spying on me? Has he been breaking into my apartment during my absence when I am at the college and during the night when I am asleep? Has he been prying into my documents, papers, and letters? How did he know that I was meditating on Hegel’s conception of the ethical state and that I am investigating the possibility of a human community governed by technocrats? What is his purpose? What does he expect from me?” She trembled and clenched her teeth hard to stop her lower jaw from shaking. She could neither think nor feel because she did not know what to believe and how to feel. Her mind was in a state of turmoil. She looked at him again and frowned. “Is this Don Juan real? Am I standing before a phantasmagoria?” These questions coursed through her mind rapidly and did not linger only because her guest threw a calm, cold-blooded glance her way. “Why don’t you sit, Dr. Athenaion?” he said, “I would very much enjoy a conversation with you on the nature and viability of a human community governed by technocrats. I doubt that any philosopher at Union or any other institution of higher learning is as conversant on this subject as you.” But Dr. Athenaion was not interested in any kind of conversation at that moment, at least not with that creature.
With her eyes still fixed on him and with her frown still looming on her forehead, Dr. Athenaion asked again, “Who are you?”
“If my identity is more important to you than a meaningful conversation on a concept you consider vitally important, I shall be happy to oblige you,” the visitor said in the same calm, cold-blooded manner. Unaware of what she was doing, Dr. Athenaion slowly, very slowly, slid into her armchair without lifting her angry eyes from his face.
“Yes, I would like to be obliged,” she said after she sat in her chair.
“I am Mowt, the God of Death!”
Mowt was the God of Death in Ugarit, a kingdom that flourished on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean during the second and first millennia, B.C. He is and always was a mythical deity. Dr. Athenaion was aware of this fact. However, the claim that the man sitting on the sofa opposite her was Mowt did not irritate her because she knew that she was not sitting in the presence of a god. What annoyed her and robbed her peace of mind was the way he behaved, and he did not act like a normal human being. Indeed, nothing about him, not even his appearance, was normal. Did she admit an anomaly to her apartment? Was she talking to a rare mutant? She could not dwell on these questions because her guest was waiting for an answer to his question and because she was anxious to discover his true identity.
“You can borrow the name of any god, any emperor, any genius, any saint, even the name of the devil. This does not matter to me.”
“Are you sure?” The guest interrupted her. “Have you forgotten that famous question, what is in a name?”
“A