On the Return to the Old Kingdom

This is written by a wiser man than I that a prince who returns to a state once familiar to him does not enter as a stranger, but as one who reclaims what fortune had only lent to others in his absence. So it was that I entered these gates again ,not with the trembling of the new, but with the quiet confidence of one who remembers where every door leads.

The first hour was given to the study of Arabic, and I confess plainly: it was a boredom fit to soothe even the most vigilant guard into sleep. There is a particular awkwardness that settles upon a room in its first hour of a new year ,boys alike unsure whether to speak, to laugh, or to remain silent, and so they choose the coward's path and do all three poorly. I sat, half-present, waiting as a soldier waits for a battle that does not yet justify his alertness.

It was in this early hour, too, that I took notice of a newcomer to our territory , one who mistook noise for confidence and clumsiness for charm. It is a common error among the young and untested , they believe that to seize attention is the same as to command respect. But a wise observer knows the two are rarely found together, and that those who announce their own importance loudest are usually the ones who have the least of it to spare. I said nothing. It is not always necessary to correct a fool aloud; time and other men's judgment will do it more thoroughly than I could.

The second hour restored what the first had drained. English , and here I must abandon the mask of cold analysis, for what I felt was closer to the joy of a returning than the calculation of a strangest. To see one's teacher again after a long absence is to feel that some alliances survive even the passage of seasons undisturbed. I was glad. Genuinely, and without needing to disguise it as anything more complicated

Arabic again, and here the boredom of the morning repeated itself, dressed in slightly different robes. Our teacher offered us quotations , the kind that even the philosophers who first spoke them might struggle to defend under close questioning , and tales of men long dead, as though their age alone lent them wisdom. I have always distrusted this habit of leaning on the dead to excuse the lack of excitement of the living. A quote from a corpse does not make an hour less long.

Mathematics, and a silence over the room unlike any I had encountered before , not the silence of fear, nor of boredom, but something stranger, as though the entire class had, without conspiring, agreed to say nothing at all. I have seen courts fall this quiet before betrayal . I could not, even by the end of the hour, determine which this was.

English returned to us a second time, and this time I permit myself no restraint in saying: it was genuinely enjoyable. Not every alliance requires suspicion. Some simply work, and a wise man learns to recognize the difference between the partner who serves him well and the one he must only tolerate.

Of the sixth hour, mathematics once more, I shall offer no comment — for it is sometimes the mark of the wisest counsel to say nothing at all, and let the hour pass into history unremarked.