Before his trial in Plato’s Apology, Socrates pleads the jury to wait a moment and consider his words:
“...I make this request of you, which I think is only reasonable: to disregard the manner of my speech--it doesn’t matter how it compares--and to consider and concentrate your attention upon this one question, whether my claims are just or not.”
A man asking to be judged not by the music of his words but by their meaning. A man standing before power without any sort of amor that the Athenians expected in their courts. A man – for lack of a better term – asking for his death.
If not for the surrounding circumstances, we could think he was following a trend, doing his duty. The Sophists built careers off this tendency to speak persuasively rather than objectively “correct.”
The thing about duty, however, is that it is often not a conscious choice. It shapes people before they recognize they are being shaped. It moves like an unseen current, pulling them toward a shore they do not remember choosing. And by the time they find their footing, they are already standing where they were always meant to be.
There’s something about that kind of standing that feels familiar, like a song hummed under the breath. The world has always had a Socrates—people who speak into the wind, carrying their words far past their own lifetimes–but it has never kept them. It has never loved people who know silence more than applause.
The world moves as it always has—turning verdicts into echoes, echoes into myth, myth into something that feels distant enough to forget. But meaning does not vanish. It only shifts. Only waits. Only waits between argument and understanding, settling into the places we do not yet know how to name.