“It’s too hot even for me,” he told them. “Almost as hot as that day ten years ago when I unearthed the head of Parmenides. They gave me an award for that.” The old man paused to let the import sink in, took a swig from his flask, and passed it.

“Tell us about it,” Jason said.

“Once in a great while I get some sightseers here and then I can recite my speech about Parmenides. He was the greatest thinker of the Eleatic School of philosophy, I tell them. This place was the ancient Elea, a place of philosophers. And the head I found was the most important thing ever excavated here. When they took it off to the National Museum in Naples, I missed the old guy. He was like a friend when I found him and kept him in my little hut here, just him and me. Then the authorities finally got around to coming for him. A great thinker, Parmenides—I could tell by the wide brow. He was a concrete man, too, a man of facts. Being is here, he told his followers, in this rock, this olive tree, this wine and water we drink. What we see, that’s reality.”

“An existentialist philosophy back in those times,” Jason said.

“That would grab you, wouldn’t it, Jason?” said Tina as she fanned herself. “You’re so much the essence of reason yourself. Even when you’re tripping, you’re reasoning.”

He turned his head sideways and looked at her quizzically. “Still trying to collect points on that? Why don’t you drop it?” For the first time she heard annoyance in his tone.

The old man looked at them both intently. “Are you Americans?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Fidanzati?”

She smiled at his asking if they were fiancés; he wanted to know if they were lovers.

“Well, not really,” Jason began.

“Friends,” Tina said.

“More than friends,” Jason went on.

“What, then?” the old man laughed.

“Sightseers,” said Tina, laughing with him. “What a place!” she said as she lay back on the ground, her hands beneath her head, looking up at the sky through the branches of the olive tree. “It makes me understand why all Parmenides could see was reality—what’s real is so good here. But take other places: If we didn’t believe in what’s not real and not out there in front of our eyes, we’d die of melancholy. Anyway, I don’t believe in one hundred percent reality or reason because life doesn’t work that way.”

“In law school they say that reason is the life of the law, and the law is perfection of reason.”

“Do you believe that, Jason?”

“Yes, I guess so. I believe that it is through law and reason that we can change for the better, and not through a constant storming of the Bastille and chopping off heads.”