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COMFORT OF COMMISERATION IN OLD AGE
    At Tasso’s table, the retired teacher has asked to skip the next hand of cards. He needs to pee, the third time in the past hour. It’s his damned prostate gland, he moans. His companions tease him. The fisherman says his friend’s prostate is so big he could use it for bait to catch a shark. The teacher stalks off to the WC, grumbling, and I am reminded of Montaigne’s recommendation to vigorously gripe about illnesses.
    Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French essayist, was well acquainted with Epicurus’s ideas. Recapping the Greek philosopher’s pleasure calculus, he wrote, “And with Epicurus, I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.” Like Epicurus, Montaigne was convinced that friendship, and the good conversation that comes with it, was the greatest pleasure available to us. In his essay “Of Vanity,” the French philosopher wrote:
“I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other
.
”
    Montaigne wrote at length about old age and, in one piece, he suggests that complaining to friends about the infirmities of old age is the best medicine: “If the body find itself relieved by complaining, let it complain; if agitation ease it, let it tumble and toss at pleasure; if it seem to find the disease evaporate (as some physicians hold that it helps women in delivery) in making loud outcries, or if this do but divert its torments, let it roar as it will.”
    Thus Montaigne insists that if we don’t let it all hang out in front of our friends, we are cheating ourselves out of one of an old person’s best palliatives—all in the name of some kind of dumb propriety. These days, in some circles of old folks, this recapitulation of complaints is known as “the organ recital,” and, God knows, it does “divert [the] torments,” at least for a bit.
    ON FACING DEATH BLISSFULLY
    The sun has begun its descent, appearing to enlarge as it nears the horizon and to dim as its rays gradually become eclipsed by our planet. Its refracted beams cast a pale, rose-colored glow onto the water, and all four men at Tasso’s table suspend their conversation to watch daylight’s finale.
    Epicurus was not afraid of death. He famously said, “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not. The absence of life is not evil; death is no more alarming than the nothingness before birth.”
    Later philosophers, especially Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian, took exception to Epicurus’s dictum, finding it simplistic. After all “when we are” we are still
conscious
of the fact that in the future we will no longer be, and that makes one hell of a difference. In fact, according to Kier­kegaard, it is enough to strike a man, young or old, with “fear and trembling.”
    Although all the men at Tasso’s table are at least nominally Greek Orthodox Christians, a religion that promises a beatific afterlife to the godly, my guess is that, like most mortals, they are not entirely immune to this terror. Nonetheless they would recognize the comfort in Epicurus’s dying words to his friend Idomeneus: “On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury [bladder spasms] and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them; but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations.”

In every real man a child is hidden who wants to play.
    â€”FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Chapter Two
    The Deserted Terrace
    ON TIME AND WORRY BEADS
    S een from the sea, Hydra seems as flimsy as a hallucination. A lucent mist envelopes the island, and the incoming hydrofoil throws