The Plinth

Scene 1: The Plinth (Tuesday)

Every Saturday, the crowds came.
They spilled from trains and buses, jerseys clinging to skin, faces painted in club colours. At the edge of the plaza, the bronze footballer stood frozen—one leg raised, mid-kick, triumph etched into the sinews of his cast-metal thigh.

Children climbed the plinth. Tourists struck poses. On game days, someone always left a beer can reverently at his feet.

But on Tuesdays, the plaza was quiet. The boots were dull. The scarves gone. Just pigeons and the echo of traffic.

And Miriam.

She unfolded her chair beneath the statue’s shadow, like a ritual of a different sort, and poured coffee from a thermos that no longer held heat. The book rested on her lap—Being and Time, its spine split, margins crowded with arguments she’d had with herself over the years.

She read slowly, pen in hand, letting Heidegger’s language wash over her like an old hymn:
“Thrownness… Being-toward-death… resoluteness.”

The world, he said, did not ask your permission. You arrive in it—time, place, bloodline, history—and from there, you begin. To live, truly, is to respond. Not to drift. Not to borrow. But to choose. To be.

Miriam didn’t believe him, not entirely. But she liked the clarity of the demand.

Footsteps interrupted her thought.

A boy—sixteen, seventeen—hovered near the base of the plinth. His schoolbag hung low on one shoulder, and he glanced at her, then at the book, then back at her again.

“What’s that?” he asked.

She looked up, smiled.

“Heidegger,” she said. “A philosopher. German. Complicated.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What’s he saying?”

She tapped the page with her pen. “That none of us chooses the world we’re born into. But we have to live in it anyway. And try to live honestly—not just copy what everyone else is doing.”

He shrugged. “Sounds depressing.”

She chuckled. “It is. A bit. But also freeing. If the world doesn’t owe you anything, you stop waiting. You start living.”

He eyed the statue behind her. “And did he live that way? Honestly?”

She hesitated. Closed the book.

“Yes. And no.”

She told him about Heidegger’s ambition. How he joined the Nazi party to become rector of a university. How he claimed it was political necessity—or philosophical strategy, depending on the day. How he also loved a student, Hannah Arendt, brilliant and Jewish, and kept writing to her for years after.

“He wrote about authenticity,” Miriam said. “About living your own real life. But he got tangled. Like everyone. Big ideas. Messy heart.”

The boy sat down on the edge of the plinth, legs swinging.

“So… what do you do with that?”

“What?”

“When someone says something beautiful, but doesn’t live it out?”

She looked at him. “You learn from them. And you learn past them.”

He didn’t reply. Just nodded slowly and stared at the statue, forever caught in motion, frozen in certainty.

Then, after a long pause:
“Can I sit here next week too?”

Miriam smiled.

“Of course,” she said. “Philosophy’s better when you don’t do it alone.”

Scene 2: Chalk Marks (Some Tuesdays Later)

By the third week, he brought a friend.
By the fifth, a small group had formed—a slow-growing circle of questioners.
They didn’t fit the team-sport mould. One played piano. One wrote in a leather-bound notebook. One had dropped out of law school but read existentialists at midnight.

They gathered beneath the bronze footballer, who never changed—boot poised mid-air, a monument to certainty.

Miriam still brought Being and Time, though now she paired it with biography. The margins were full not just of Heidegger’s ideas, but his contradictions. She had scribbled notes that spilled across pages:
“He speaks of authenticity, but what of fidelity?”
“Does freedom excuse betrayal?”
“What do we do when the thinker fractures the thought?”

One Tuesday, she arrived early, coffee in hand. The plaza was empty, the tiles still damp from the night’s rain.

And there it was.

Someone had chalked a square on the pavement beside the statue—neat, careful, and deliberate. Inside, in block letters:

“For those still figuring it out.”

Beneath it, messier script:

“Maybe being isn’t something you win.
Just something you live.”

She stood quietly, letting the words settle. The footballer remained suspended—caught forever in motion, untouched by doubt. But here, beneath him, was something more fragile.
And, somehow, truer.

The boy arrived ten minutes later, winded from a run.

“You saw it?”

She nodded. “Was it you?”

He hesitated. “Josh started it. I added the second bit.”

They sat.

He gestured at the statue. “You know… Heidegger said we’re thrown into the world. That we have to take responsibility. Live with freedom. Make meaning. But he still joined the Nazis.”

She looked down at her coffee. “He was thirty-eight. Married. Two children. Secretly in love with Hannah Arendt. And another woman too, also Jewish. It wasn’t a clear path. It was a storm.”

“But he talked about death,” the boy said. “About how we live because we know we’ll die. About choosing what matters, because time runs out.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes. That’s the paradox. He wrote that even if God was dead, we could still make something of our lives. Still choose what’s right.”

“And he didn’t.”

“No,” she said. “He didn’t. Not then. Not in the way we’d hope.”

They sat in silence.
The pigeons returned. A jogger passed. Somewhere nearby, a garbage truck rattled past its daily routine.

“I guess ideas aren’t enough,” the boy said.

Miriam looked up at the chalk square.

“No,” she said. “They aren’t. Not without love. Not without courage.”

He picked up a piece of chalk from his backpack and held it without writing.

“I don’t know what to say yet.”

“You don’t have to,” she said.

He nodded, then smiled faintly.

“Next time, perhaps.” And that was enough for now.