#342: Breath

Finding Greek philosophy in the first breath of the season

I saw my first breath of the season. A vapour emerging from my mouth, turning me into an autumnal dragon. Once spotted, I could not stop. Opening my mouth wide, I drew in one big lung-full of air, held it, and then — whoosh. I breathed out my misty warmth into the cold atmosphere.

Trying to capture vapour is like trying to capture a cloud. From the ground, we think clouds are something of substance, soft and fluffy, a bouncy castle in the sky for the gods or angels or Peter Pan and Wendy. But when you get up there into the sky, the fluffiness is not to be found. When a plane enters a cloud it does not bounce, but glide, right through to the other side. What seemed so impenetrable, a barrier between earth and sun, is proved nonexistent, illusory.

As I breathe out, I remember a university class I took in Early Greek Philosophy. In this class, I learnt how humans (men) tried to understand the world through logic and the senses: the observable world, so to speak. Different philosophers came up with different cosmologies and cosmogonies, producing different diagrams for how they thought the earth fit into a wider system of the sun, moon, and stars.

One such philosopher was Anaximenes, who observed an act we can all try ourselves. When you breathe out with your mouth in the shape of a small ‘o’, making a narrow opening with your lips, the air is cool; when you breathe out with a big, wide, open mouth, the air is warm. Go on, try it. See? It’s the two actions we do automatically to cool down our food, or warm up our cold hands.

From this observational evidence stemmed Anaximenes’ wider cosmogony and cosmology, with air as the material principle. Everything was focused around the role of air, as he used what he knew in everyday, observable human life to make sense of the universe. He may not have gotten everything right, but he was part of the beginning of a process that has become modern day science: observing, analysing, theorising.

So as I stand at my open window, leaning out into the autumnal air, I take many deep breaths, consciously, deeply, pausing between in — and out. I marvel at the seasons, which in their own way bring warmer and then cooler air into my experience of the atmosphere. As I ponder, I realise that in some ways, it feels like I never had a summer — certainly not the one I was expecting, which would have been full of train commutes, in-person meetings, and hosting family and friends in our home.

Autumn has arrived, winter is coming, and still these things are not happening. Like the breath in front of me, the clouds above me, my ‘normal’, pre-covid-world seems like an illusory past. I cannot hold it, capture it, and like vapour and clouds, it cannot be captured. Yet maybe, as I step through the cloud that is 2020, I’ll glide through, and eventually — one day—I’ll come out on the other side, to find a blue sky and warmer, more welcoming air.

Katie writes regularly about random objects that she finds in her everyday life. If you’re interested in reading more, check out her blog Object, a collaboration with fellow Medium blogger Eleanor. You can also follow us on Twitter @ ObjectBlog.