(Chapter 5)
In which Diogenes sleeps in a bed .
This is a picture of Diogenes the Cynic, back in his Athenian days. Now in the modern age, he is
experiencing the oddities of modern life - and its comforts...
The first day had passed of sojourning on earth.
It was time that Diogenes thought of a bed.
In the days when he lived in the heyday of Greece
Diogenes tended to sleep in a tub—
Or to be academic, a large sort of jar—
That was left in the square in the center of town.
There he flaunted indifference to comforts of life.
No such jar, or such tub, was available now
As he poked through the city in which he’d been placed.
Not, of course, that he couldn’t just dump out the trash
From a near-lying bin and attempt to rest there;
But he thought of racoons and of plasticine gum
And his skin felt the air blowing colder than once
It had blown in his home near the Heavenly Courts.
So he walked on in search of alternative beds.
As he went he encountered a bath-fixture shop
With a spot-lighted tub in a window display:
But the shop was closed up and the lights very bright
And the tub had a cluster of unexplained knobs.
His feet took him next to what seemed a hotel
With the name Angelique flanked with resinate wings.
As a heaven-sent thought it occurred to him then
That perhaps Holy Peter had booked him a stay
In the hopes of delaying his speedy return.
So it was. When he entered the Angel Hotel
And declared that his name was Diogenes C,
The clerk gave a nod, his room was prepared,
Was there need of a porter, he saw there was not.
When he got to his chamber Diogenes found
Both a pillow-stacked bed and a porcelain tub.
As he looked at the bed and he looked at the tub,
A division arose in his mind what to do.
To be true to the mode of his earlier life
He must bed in the tub for the whole of the night;
But the point of tub-sleeping had always been show
And here were no watchers but angels and saints.
He fingered the tub. What fabric it was,
Its toughness exceeded the clay of the Greeks,
And the shape was too cramped for his limbs to extend.
For comparison’s sake he attempted the bed.
As philosophers know (and of these he was one),
That which matters is mind, not conditions without.
So long as he kept his interior will
From attaching itself to the softness and plump,
He thought that perhaps he could give it a try,
Not a regular thing, but a bed now and then.
After all, one could argue the merits were more,
For surely it’s harder to sleep in a bed
While remaining detached than to sleep in a tub.
“I’ll try it,” he said, and beyond said no more.
Now, for us, gentle reader, we leave him to sleep,
But I hope you are not undesirous to spend
More days of adventure with him and with me;
For strange are the sights we have waiting to see.
Andrew Horne
If you have any thoughts about this poem, Andrew Horne would like to hear them
