No one remembers how he came to stand among the peonies. The garden simply woke one June night and found him there, as if he had grown out of the flowers, with a crown of white and pink blossom rising above his head like a halo.
He is made of plaster, as all such heads are, and plaster heads are strange creatures. They are copies of copies of ancient faces, cast again and again so that the young could learn the shape of wisdom by drawing it. They wear the faces of thinkers, yet they are solid all the way through, heavy as stone, with no room inside for a single thought of their own. So each of them can be given one, and will hold it forever. One of them was once given fear and became the Prophet, who shows every man his own truth. This one was given time.
The stars have settled on his face like dust. Small brass gears turn in his brow, so that one can almost hear him think. And where his eyes should be, there is an hourglass laid on its side. A sideways hourglass does not run. The sand rests in both halves at once. Through such glass the Sage looks past the hour and the day, straight through time itself.
People come to him for wisdom, as they go to the Prophet for answers. He gives them a single sentence: all I know is that I know nothing, but the others do not know that either.
Most of them leave disappointed. They wanted something they could carry home and hand to their children. But this is the old joke hidden in every plaster head. It was cast to teach, and the one thing it holds cannot be taught. Knowledge passes from hand to hand like coin. Wisdom does not. Each person has to walk to it alone, and only they will know the road.
Years later the same hourglass returned to the collection. In the second episode of the saga it is held by a dead king, who learned too late what the Sage had always known: time is the only thing that never belonged to us.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in June 2023.)
