Great white runner

Miles from the great white Olympic Stadium, in the labyrinthine streets of the Plaka at the foot of the Acropolis, the 500-ring circus of the Games roars on. At 4 a.m. Saturday night, Monasteraki Square is the center of the world! It must be 85 degrees out and thousands of people, mostly young and in various stages of euphoria, lust and inebriation (a bar down the street has a huge banner reading "Citius, Altius, Fortius, Drinkius"), are milling around, looking for action or a souvlaki. At the closing ceremony in Sydney four years ago, the ritual call went out, summoning the "youth of the world" to come to Athens, and all of them seem to have heard it, these stylishly dressed Greeks and singing, yellow-draped Swedes and blond Poles in red and white capes and ruddy open-faced Aussies in absurd green and yellow leprechaun hats and maybe even an ingenuous, furtive American or two.

Four men wearing T-shirts marked "Iraq" careen across the square near the Metro station, one of them beating loudly with a stick on a drum hanging from his neck, celebrating their victory in football, letting everyone know, letting themselves know that they're here and happy to be here. An American and an Iraqi pass, under this silly and marvelous truce created so that 3-meter platform diving might peacefully endure.

It's a great feeling to realize that at this moment, in these streets, there are more people from more different places than anywhere else in the world. Maybe it's that, and the ever-ticking clock of the Games themselves, that gives the whole scene that uniquely joyous, sharp-edged Olympics buzz, that sense that big things are happening all around you, that these two weeks are blazoned and will never come back. The Olympic Games can be banal, and exhausting, but it's our planet's one and only block party, and at times it lets you see the earth a bit the way the astronauts do, whole and small and precious. Other times, you wonder why deodorant has not become universally accepted.

Then there is Athens. The Acropolis, much higher than you remember, is a constant affront, reminder, question, dream: It can't actually be there, but it is. You look over your shoulder, above the throngs, and it is still there, and it stops you in your tracks. Of all the monuments of antiquity, it is the most unsettling, because we are still in a conversation with the ancient Greeks, still moving down the questioning, probing course they charted 2,500 years ago.

And so the fact that the Games are here in Greece, where they began in 776 B.C., is endlessly beguiling. Sometimes it feels meaningless; other times almost unbearably evocative. What thread runs between that vanished age and this? Does the spirit of an ancient runner somehow reach out across the endless centuries to place a baton in our own hands? The answer depends on your mood. On Monday, you're a soaring Platonist, making connections between the ideal form of the games of ancient Attica and our own age. On Tuesday, you're an earthbound Aristotelean, denying that the alien culture of the ancient Greeks, and their all-male, religious, death-tainted athletic festivals, has much to do with us at all.

But the stones are still here, and when the wind blows just right through the ancient Kerameikos, the cemetery, long-vanished faces and never-vanished questions stir like ghosts, like memories -- of mocking Aristophanes and corrosive Socrates and proud Hector and cold-eyed Athena and the sad-faced little baby reaching out with stone arms for its dead mother, and that nameless red and black figure running on an urn, and all the rest of the gods and mortals who we do not understand, who we talk to constantly, who made us what we are.

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