The Road Of The Roses (A Sweet Short Story)
? by Michela Arturina Betta
? A beautiful rose bush grew by the roadside. The magnificent flowers created an atmosphere of incredible sweetness. The roses’ exuberant scent was so inviting that even the most absentminded walker stopped to inhale it deeply. Passers-by wondered how such lovely flowers could thrive so remarkably well given the most recent weather events. Many spoke of a miracle. The roses, however, were no saints but only wise plants that had adapted to climate change. They stood in close proximity to a busy road, a thoroughfare, in fact, which stretched across a vast land called the human condition.
Travellers found the road tortuous, at times dangerous and often dusty. It could also be a terrifyingly unsafe strip of land to walk on. But people said that the perils were nothing compared to the rewards awaiting them at their destination. This was a place called Flourishing. It is here that people who had flourished or were flourishing sooner or later would land up.
According to those who had visited it, and depending on their taste, which varied enormously, Flourishing was a holy place, a serious site, a magic arena, an entertaining theatre, a democratic location, a space for radical freedom, a good working area, a rich estate or a humble refuge. Everybody exalted its atmosphere which had helped them to find answers to their existential questions. Whether these answers were good or bad, though, they could not tell. They, however, were told that good answers would help them improve their virtuous character because acquiring and retaining virtues was an endless work-in-progress. This meant that Flourishing was not an endpoint but a passage, a way leading to the achievement of a complete life which found its most natural manifestation in self-sufficiency. Not everybody rejoiced at this information, though. To some of the newcomers who had been on the road for months, in some instances even years, and had endured unspeakable hardship before reaching Flourishing, this was too much. Tired and exhausted at their arrival, they wanted to enjoy what they had achieved hitherto. In their minds, their existential trip ended at Flourishing. These people also looked with suspicion upon the language of its long-term residents. And they also resisted the idea that to flourish meant to achieve a complete life. In their mind self-sufficiency and a complete life were the trophies of a life nearing its end. A dead life!
The newcomers split into two groups. There were those who decided, rationally, to submit to the rules of Flourishing and work on themselves until the very end, and those who found life under such dramatic conditions too emotionally restricted. This group of people ultimately left Flourishing, a place they had once revered, to resume their old identities of fallible human beings. They would never forget their experience, though, and sometimes, especially when they felt unhappy, they reproached themselves for their former lack of consistency. But they fondly remembered the luscious roses, a memory that always cheered them up, for those flowers had treated them with respect. That so much well-mannered beauty could flourish along that road was beyond their comprehension.
Intrigued by these opposing stories about Flourishing, the empiricist David decided to pay it a visit. He wanted to see for himself before passing any judgment. Empiricists like him trusted passions and sensory impressions more than reason. Not that they dismissed rationality, but they strongly believed that decisions were influenced by sentiments and feelings rather than sheer cognition. So David started his journey and walked for many days, till he saw a wonderful rose bush. It was indeed an electrifying vision in the middle of that inhospitable land.
David stopped in front of the roses and immediately felt a desire to pick the flower which had caught his fancy. He stretched out his arm and was about to break it off when a stern voice made him stop. “Soll ich zum welken gebrochen sein?” Startled, he stepped back. Astonished, this is how he felt in hearing the rose speak, and to speak in German, a language he was familiar with. “Must I be picked to fade and die?”, this is what the rose had said. The question brought to mind an anecdote concerning a friend of his, a poet by the name of Johann Wolfgang. One day, this friend had been out walking in the forest where he found a beautiful plant thriving peacefully under a tall tree. He decided to brake off a branch, the most beautiful one in fact, and take it to his study. But when he approached the plant, it asked him the very same question as the rose had asked David. Admiring its survival instinct, the poet resolved instead to uproot the evergreen and replant it in his garden. There, he later told David, it continued to blossom happily. David, however, now realised that it must have been painful for the plant to be removed from its dear forest and floral companions and to be confined to a man’s boring yard. Here, it had no other option than to flourish because it had understood pretty well that this new owner would have extirpated it as mercilessly as he had picked it, had it not delivered flowers every year. David now understood that poets can be cruel too.
Addressing the beautiful roses David asked them about their ability to speak a foreign language. “We speak many languages,” they said, “which we have learned from the passers-by who have stopped to admire us and rest under the shadow of our large bush.”
“Who were these passers-by?” David enquired.
“People walking to Flourishing,” they replied.
“I have heard that, after reaching Flourishing, many travellers decided to remain there forever, while some others left soon after their arrival disappointed with the place,” David observed.
“That is true,” the roses said, “but we have met other people on this road.”
“What can you tell me about them?”
The flowers replied that a group of passers-by never made it to Flourishing despite their best resolutions. Their journey, however, had been productive (at least this is what they said) because, while they were on the road, they picked up new virtues such as patience, constancy of purpose and humility which had helped them to develop novel abilities and appreciate them. Having realised that flourishing was a special condition attainable only gradually, they gratefully accepted the level of flourishing they had reached on their trip and had returned home relieved. The roses then mentioned a group of unhappy travellers. They had learned no new talents; their skills, which had been poor at the time they undertook their journey, did not improve either. With such weak disposition, how could they resist temptation? They were also repeatedly cheated and mistreated on their way to Flourishing but nobody had come to their rescue. Angry and defeated, they criticised a place which, in their mind, had been the cause of their downfall. In a soft tone of voice, though, the generous roses added that the unhappy travellers had eventually admitted their own faults and lack of character in wanting to go to Flourishing despite their flaws.
David asked the roses if they had heard back from this group of people, if, despite their misery, they had returned homes safely. But before the roses could answer his question, a disquieting dark and dense shadow embraced the landscape and thereafter the beautiful flowers closed their petals for the night. David thought that by the time the buds would open again, he would be far away for he intended to walk all night and reach Flourishing at dawn.
He arrived there early in the morning. A few hours later, and after a sound rest and a hearty meal, he ventured out into the streets. Everything looked inviting. The light was clearly special, and the buildings standing on either side of the main avenue were quite remarkable; even public housings were presentable; there were also elegant shops and the public parks and areas were all clean and well-kept. Everything seemed in order. The general atmosphere evoked a sense of perfection. This was indeed a formidable place.
Still David felt a pang of anxiety.
He went into a chic salon. He saw people intent on listening closely to music or perhaps to an author reading from a book, or were they attending an exhibition? He could not tell because all these activities were taking place at the same time. Somebody waved to him; it was a distinguished-looking lady who invited him to join her table. She enquired about his journey. He answered by saying that it had been a difficult walk due to several unexpected events which almost sabotaged his plans and seemed designed to stop him from reaching his goal. David was quick to add, though, that it had also been an instructive trip for he had learned how to help those in material needs, by sharing his food with them, and those in spiritual needs, by supporting their quest for harmony. When it came to physical attractions, David went forth, he fastened his body around his conscience to resist lethal desires. The lady now asked him if he was happy to be in Flourishing.
?David leaned back in his comfortable chair and examined his own feelings. The anxiety he had detected in the morning had not dissolved under the warm sun of Flourishing. On the contrary, it had hardened. In an attempt to find out more about this strange place, David enquired gently after the lady’s reason for living there. Instantly more people joined the conversation, and someone else answered instead of the lady. That person said that they had left their cities and jobs to come to Flourishing to experience life freed from the frantic competition of today’s world, to enjoy pure and natural life. “Away from the harmful way of living in contemporary culture,” the same person remarked, “where ill people are blamed for their ailments and healthy ones are praised.” Only now did David realise that several of the bystanders looked quite sick. Anticipating his question, somebody observed that he and others had refused treatments based on the current techno-scientific healthcare. A woman looking very unwell explained to him that she was using bodily suffering to explore her deeper self.
David listened to them carefully.
He found their views quite radical. Were they influenced by some romantic discourse about a lost natural world that was allegedly destroyed by the progress of vita activa, as his friend Hannah used to call people’s working life? As he kept reflecting about their rejection of the comforts of safe analgesics and surgery, another friend came to mind. This time it was Svante, a palaeontologist interested in early humanity. David recollected one of their conversations during which Svante remarked that if Neanderthal man instead of Homo Sapiens had survived, today’s world might have been simpler, probably much less innovative and scientific. But perhaps also more peaceful without the crazy homo sapiens, that restless explorer who is always bent on crossing oceans and going into space for no apparent reason. Maybe the citizens of Flourishing had retained some of the Neanderthal genome?, David mused.
Speaking directly to the sick-looking woman David cautiously said, “How could a rotten bodily organ or cancerous blood ever reveal a deeper self to you?” His listeners looked at him in disbelief. But he did not let himself be stopped by their gaze. “Even nature,” he added, “corrects herself when things do not work as they should, when some wrong design disturbs the organic frame of the world.” The Flourishing crowd, however, was beyond reach. Undeterred by their air of self-assurance, David admonished them: “Remember you people that actions are good and virtuous only when they originate in good and virtuous motives.”
No sooner had he spoken these words than the light changed and a gelid silence enveloped Flourishing. Doubts assailed David’s confidence: Did not self-sufficiency mark a complete existence? Was death approaching?
He rose hastily from his chair and skilfully avoided the trembling hands of the bystanders who were desperately trying to hold him back. He ran out of the salon, which had suddenly lost its attraction, onto the square; he crossed it at high speed and reached the main avenue at the end of which a giant iron gate was about to close. He must have passed through it the night before without noticing it. In stopping to catch his breath, David turned around and saw the distinguished lady and her friends staring at him. Somebody cried, “Stop running, come back, you are safe here. You won’t need friends and family, love and affection, kindness and beauty anymore! You will have yourself, you will flourish here because nothing and nobody will disturb you… you will be self-sufficient!”
David summoned all his forces and leaped towards the gate. He knew that he would not be able to open it once it had been shut. He tripped over something and lost his balance as well as his mobile which fell out of his pocket. He tried to pick it up twice, and twice the mobile slipped out of his hands. They were sweating, as was his whole body, because of his fear that the citizens of Flourishing might catch up with him. It was at this point that he noticed the petal of a rose lying on the ground next to his device. “How very strange,” it flashed through his mind, “a petal… of all things…”. He grabbed the petal and his phone and resumed his running. This time it was as if he had wings on his feet. Instantly, he was through the gate which closed behind him with a loud bang. He stopped to look at the scene from the other side of the gate and saw how everybody was standing unmovable, as if frozen to death.
David was holding the delicate petal in his trembling hand, and in instantly recognising which rose it belonged to, he felt overwhelmed by a deep sense of admiration for that flower’s quiet wisdom. He brought the petal to his lips and kissed it, tenderly and lovingly. Walking back in solemn silence, he anticipated the happy moment when he would reach the rose bush. But there was no sign of the roses anywhere on the road. After a time that seemed infinitely long and filled with anguish, he arrived at his home. The joyous voices of his friends and family comforted his heavy heart. He spoke about his adventure and they listened compassionately.
How was he going to reflect on his experience? Reason warned him against drawing hasty conclusions for flourishing was a journey of self-discovery that lasted until the very end. Passions and emotions urged him to lay down his weapons and to have hopes. As he did so a familiar scent flared his nostrils. He stared and looked and saw her, his elegant Rose, smiling and walking toward him.
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mab created on 28-02-2023?