Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City Read Free

Japan—descriptions of which eerily echoed the “violent earthquakes and floods” that Plato claimed destroyed Atlantis—I was sitting in my office when Atlantis news alerts started pinging like a pinball machine. Evidently, someone had found the lost island for real this time, or at least serious media outlets around the world were treating the latest discovery as news.
    I was torn. The logical, Aristotle half of my brain told me that it couldn’t be possible, that any search for Atlantis was bound to be the wildest of goose chases. The daydreamy, Plato half of my brain said that nothing was beyond imagining. Perhaps this was something I should look into further, I thought. I searched out a passage I’d underlined in Plato’s
Meno
, in which the characters discuss the limits of knowledge. One philosopher says to another, “We shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to inquire than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know.”
    Bumper sticker translation: If you don’t ask questions, you’ll never find any answers.

CHAPTER TWO
    Philosophy 101: Intro to Plato
    Lowenstein Academic Building, Fordham University
    W hen I first read that Plato was the source of the Atlantis myth, I imagined the Atlantis I knew from Saturday morning cartoons: a city of hyperintelligent beings who dwelled beneath the waves in air-locked bubble houses powered by magic crystals. It turned out that Plato’s original version is a bit more complicated and a lot more interesting.
    The Atlantis tale unfolds in two parts, stretched across a pair of Plato’s later works, the
Timaeus
and the
Critias
. Few non-Atlantologists without PhDs are familiar with these dialogues, and for a good reason: They are extremely weird. They are also, however, closely related to Plato’s most famous dialogue, the
Republic
,
which would finish first in a poll to determine the most influential philosophical work of all time. The
Republic
is logical and forceful and covers a lot of ground—not many books can be called foundational texts of both Christianity and Fascism—and is packed with brilliant, radical ideas.
    The
Timaeus
, a dialogue that Plato wrote as a sort of sequel to the
Republic—
and which introduced Atlantis to the world—is messy and confusing. It contains mathematics, cosmology, natural sciences, an explanation of why time exists, possibly ironic musings on whattypes of animals humans transform into after reincarnation, and, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell drily noted, “more that is simply silly than is to be found in [Plato’s] other writings.” The
Critias
, which provides most of the details used to search for Atlantis, reads like a Greek myth rewritten by a middle schooler whose grade depends on using lots of numbers and adjectives. It ends unresolved, halfway through a sentence.
    Two painful attempts to plow through the
Timaeus
and
Critias
convinced me
that I needed a guide. Enter Brian Johnson, who was teaching Introduction to Plato at Fordham University. I was swayed by his near-perfect ratings on RateMyProfessors.com, which included encouraging comments such as “Philosophy can be reallllly boring, but he makes it interesting.” Johnson invited me up to his tiny, windowless office on the eighth floor of a high-rise on Manhattan’s west side. He was slim, bespectacled, and cheerful. We purchased gigantic coffees in the university cafeteria and retired to the silence of the philosophy department.
    One reason why the
Timaeus
is so confusing, Johnson explained, is that it was the product of a rather daunting assignment Plato had given himself—to formulate a theory that explained pretty much everything in existence, known and unknown. “There’s no such thing as a cosmic book that you can open up and it explains the laws of nature,” Johnson said. “Plato’s concerned about the grounds for knowledge. He’s