"Yes! Exactly. And yet also and most fundamentally: no. You parrot what you have been told, but your teachers missed the point because they are circumscribed by their own immersion in a culture of written words. It is not that a man died and another was called to be an Immortal, to fill a role. Rather, Immortals cannot die because the role supersedes the man. When a body falls, another steps into its place—so the Immortal goes on. A person living in this way is not the sum of their experience, of fallible human memory, but the expression of a permanent identity. It is not a convention or even a magic. It is a truth, as simple as the sunrise. But the true Greece exists only in that other world. The Greece we inhabit now is a shadow. We must rediscover a way of being in which the divine is everywhere, in which we move through a world where theology is literally true. If we can do that, we will indeed return to the days of Plato and our greatness." He smiles, and I wonder if my mouth is noticeably open or if I look as fucked in the earholes as I presently feel.