A Treasury Against Forgetful Old Age
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Socrates — … ὅταν δὲ γράφῃ, ἑαυτῷ τε ὑπομνήματα θησαυριζόμενος, εἰς τὸ λήθης γῆρας ἐὰν ἵκηται,… ἡσθήσεταί τε αὐτοὺς θεωρῶν φυομένους ἁπαλούς·
Having demolished the pretension of writing, Socrates is careful not to condemn the thing itself. The man of knowledge will still write — but knowing what writing is, and so 'for the sake of play,' paidias charin. And when he does, he writes to lay up hypomnēmata, 'reminders,' treasuring them for himself against 'the forgetfulness of old age' (lēthēs gēras) should he live to reach it, and for anyone who follows the same path; and he takes a quiet pleasure in it, 'delighting to watch them grow up tender' — the seedlings of his garden, and the words on his page, kept side by side in one gentle image. It is the picture of an old man in his garden, not a polemicist against ink.
Socrates softens the verdict: the man of knowledge is no book-burner. He will sow his 'gardens in letters' for the sake of play — and, when he writes, do it to lay up reminders for himself against the day his memory fails, delighting quietly in his tender crop while others amuse themselves at drinking-parties.
This is the passage that saves the whole critique from self-contradiction, and it does so with a single distinction. Writing is condemned only as a claimant to knowledge and a substitute for the living word; as <em>play</em> and as a <em>reminder</em> it is not merely tolerated but tenderly embraced. The key term is <em>hypomnēma</em>, a written 'reminder,' close kin to the <em>hypomnēsis</em> the myth already opposed to true memory — but now heard without contempt. A note does not pretend to be knowledge; it prompts a memory that already lives in the soul. That is exactly its right and modest office: a scaffold for a failing mind, 'against the forgetfulness of old age.' There is real poignancy in the phrase, and it is surely not accidental that it is spoken by Socrates, an old man himself, near his own end, imagining the writer as an elderly gardener delighting in tender shoots while younger men water themselves at symposia. The image quietly redeems the 'gardens of Adonis': those festival pots were dismissed as fruitless, but a garden grown for delight, for play, for the pleasure of watching things come up, needs no other justification. Plato is also, unmistakably, describing his own practice. The dialogues are <em>hypomnēmata</em> — cultivated gardens of writing, planted as serious play, <em>spoudaia paidia</em>, to remind a reader of what he must finally come to know for himself. The care of the passage is that it holds two truths at once: writing cannot teach, and yet the writing of one who knows can be among the loveliest and most humane of an old philosopher's pleasures.
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