Every Sunday, Mellow Julian went to the city market to search for birds. Commonly a crowd of his adoring students made his modest outing into a public spectacle.
The timeless questions of youth tortured the cultured young men of the town. “What is a gentleman’s proper relationship to his civic duty, and how can he weasel out of it?” Or: “Who is more miserable, the young man whose girl has died, or the young man whose girl will never love him?”
Although Julian had been rude to men in power, he was never rude to his students. He saw each of these young men as something like a book: a hazardous, long-term, difficult project that might never find a proper ending. Julian understood their bumbling need to intrude on his private life. A philosopher didn’t have one.
On this particular market Sunday, Julian was being much pestered by Bili, a pale, delicate, round-headed eccentric whose wealthy father owned a glass smelter. The bolder academy students were repelled by Bili’s mannerisms, so they hadn’t come along. Mellow Julian tolerated Bili’s youthful awkwardness. Julian had once been youthful and awkward himself.
Under their maze of parasols, cranes, aqueducts, and archery towers, the finer merchants of Selder sold their fabrics, scissors, fine glass baubles, medications, oils, and herbal liquors. The stony city square held a further maze of humble little shacks, the temporary stalls of the barkers. The barkers were howling about vegetables.
“Asparagus! Red lettuce! Celery! Baby bok choy!” Each shouted name had the tang of romance. Selder’s greenhouses close-packed the slope of the mountain like so many shining warts. It was for these rare and precious vegetables that foreigners braved the windy mountain passes and the burning plains.
Mellow Julian bought watercress and spinach, because their bright-green spiritual vibrations clarified his liver.
“Maestro, why do you always buy the cheapest, ugliest food in this city?” Bili piped up. “Spinach is awful.”
“It’s all that I know how to cook,” Julian quipped.
“Maestro, why don’t you marry? Then your wife could cook.”
