There's a homesickness that has no house attached to it. You feel it and you can't say for where. Plotinus had a name for the place — he called it the One, and he said you came from there.
He taught it as three floors, one under the other. The One at the top, past speaking, past being. Under it the Intellectual-Principle, the mind where the pure ideas live. Under that, Soul, which reaches down and makes the world we stand in. Each floor is a dimming of the one above it — the light the same light, only fainter the further down it falls.
And here's the part Hall kept coming back to. The Soul never really left. What came down into a body was an image of the Soul — a reflection cast on the water, the way light lands on a surface without the sun going anywhere. Narcissus leaned over the pool to hold his own face and drowned holding it. That's the story. The soul in love with its picture in matter, forgetting it was ever the thing casting the picture.
The old fables all say it once. Odysseus takes ten years of wrong turnings to reach his own shore. The prodigal spends everything and only then turns for home. Porphyry said the soul drinks from a cup of forgetfulness on the way down, and that the river Styx, the river Jordan, and the sea Ulysses could not cross are all the same water — the water between you and where you started.
So how do you go back up? Not by adding anything. That's what catches people. You'd think the road home is acquisition — more knowing, more getting. Plotinus says the opposite.
In the essay on beauty — the little one Hall loved, the gem that fell from a brilliant pen — Plotinus tells you to be the sculptor. "Cut away what is superfluous. Smooth what is rough." The statue was already in the marble. Socrates said as much of his own work — he took no credit, because the figure had been standing in the stone the whole time, waiting for the wrong parts to come off.
That's the whole ascent. You climb through opinion, through the senses, through knowledge, into wisdom — and each step is a step of removal, not of gain. Beauty, Plotinus said, was here before mind came. You see it in the flight of a bird, in a child who isn't trying. It doesn't belong to the beautiful thing; it's on loan to it. The Good — which for these men just meant God — is what everything quietly wants. To be turned away from it is the one real sickness of the soul.
Now let this land in the chest, not just the head. You are not being asked to become something. You're being asked to stop mistaking the reflection for the face. The homesickness isn't a flaw in you. It's the memory of the One doing its slow work — pulling the image back toward the thing it's an image of.
Here's the world we actually live in. A managed surface. A filing of things, laid smooth over an older order that was never filed at all. And every time a man understands this — really understands it, feels it in the mind and the heart at the same moment — a brick goes quietly missing from a wall that was never real.
The statue was always in the stone. You are the stone. Start taking away.