Free Philosophy Made Simple by Robert Hellenga Page A

it better, after all, to follow Aristotle’s advice and appreciate the wonder of the world around us, the wonder
     of ordinary experience, instead of wandering like Plato out to the edge of the universe in order to see what lies beyond?
    As he turned the pages, rereading the passages he’d underlined, he could feel Medardo’s hand on his shoulder, strong and warm and human.
    “La la la,”
he sang, and laughed again.

    Rudy was restless. He dug up a small garden next to the garage and put in lettuce, potatoes, a few tomato plants, some basil,
     some hot peppers, and then he made the garden bigger and planted broccoli and cauliflower, zucchini and cucumbers, more herbs.
     He wanted to plant arugula — Helen had been wild about arugula, which she’d tasted for the first time in Italy — but couldn’t find any seeds. He bought a teach-yourself-Spanish book and a Spanish dictionary at a used bookstore in Mission, determined to master the conditional and the subjunctive. He walked across the international bridge to Reynosa three times in one week,
     on Monday, on Wednesday, and again on Friday, to practice his Spanish. OnMonday he ate a taquito at the Zaragoza market, surrounded by Mexican schoolgirls in their plaid uniforms; on Wednesday he ate the fixed-price
comida corrida
at Joe’s Place — a run-down nightclub with pictures of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac on the wall behind the bar — and on Friday he ate
cabrito
at a place called Casa Viejo, where the middle-aged waiters wore tuxedos. Rudy had hoped that raising avocados would be as enlightening, in its own way, as philosophy; he hoped it might teach him patience and wisdom. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t.
     The problem with avocados, Rudy discovered, was that they didn’t make many demands on him. The Texas Lula doesn’t have any natural predators and isn’t subject to any diseases, so there was no need to spray. Most of the avocado growers also had citrus trees to keep them occupied, but all Rudy had to do from April to September was irrigate once a month. He spent some time on the phone with Harry Becker in Chicago, and with Nick Regiacorte, who handled avocados for the Graziano brothers at the Houston Produce Center. He paid visits to the Texas A&M Extension agent in Weslaco, who had put in a small experimental grove,
     and to the manager of the packing house in Hidalgo, who was going to ship his avocados. After that, there was no one to talk to except Medardo and the Russian, Norma Jean’s owner, whose name he couldn’t pronounce.
    With Medardo he talked philosophy, trying to explain, in Spanish, whatever he’d been reading in
Philosophy Made Simple.
Medardo himself was a skeptic. Like Pyrrho, who’d served under Alexander the Great, he’d seen enough of the world to know that whatever people south of the border believed, the opposite would be believed by people north of the border. Rudy would always try to keep Medardo longer by offering him another bottle of Pearl, but Medardo would drink one beer and smoke one cigarette and then be on his way.
    With the Russian he talked art, drawing on his memories of Helens lectures. Rudy’d always preferred pictures that were pictures of something, and for the most part Helen had too — saints and popes and cardinals and naked women, horses and buildings and landscapes — but at the end of her life Helen had turned to abstract art—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko —
     as if being free from pictures
of
something was liberating. At first the abstract paintings meant nothing to Rudy, but they seemed to open up for Helen a warm,
     silent space in which her spirit could rest, like a bird after a long flight, and that’s what Rudy looked for in Norma Jeans paintings, a place to rest. But the paintings troubled him the same way the paintings that Helen kept returning to troubled him. Was there really something
there?
Was he looking at true Beauty or just at some paint splashed on a