Tag: Ulysses

The Old Age of Odysseus

Everywhere I go, people are talking about Nolan’s The Odyssey.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I have a deep love for the text and wonder how many people realize that it is a book about old age?

Of course, Homer’s epic is about many things.  Most obviously, it is about a man trying to get home.  When I first read it, it reminded me of a recurring dream where I am trying to get somewhere and obstacles keep stopping me.  When I was a student, I was trying to get to class to take an exam in the dream.  As a young mother, I was trying to get home to feed some starving animals in my dream.  I think this interrupted journey is a kind of universal dream theme.  But in reading The Odyssey in my old age, it is evident to me that this is also a story of old age, a dream of… what?

Everyone agrees that Odysseus is an old man for his time (between 55 and 60) when he finally arrives back in Ithaca after many storms and seductions to impede his progress.  He is obviously still a strong and vital man, especially when contrasted with his wonderful old dog and his ancient father – who must have been about 80.  He battles the suitors, and then the relatives of the slain, until the gods negotiate a peace, and finally… what?  Well, it depends on whom you ask.

The text itself gives one answer.  When Odysseus is in the underworld he converses with the prophet Tiresias, who tells him exactly what will and should happen:

But once you have killed those suitors in your halls – /by stealth or in open fight with slashing bronze – /go forth once more, you must … /carry your well-planed oar until you come /to a race of people who know nothing of the sea…. And here is your sign –/ unmistakable, dear, so clear you cannot miss it: /When another traveler falls in with you and calls /that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain,/ then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea, Poseidon…/ And at last your own death will steal upon you … /a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age /with all your people there in blessed peace around you. (Book XI, Fagles translation)

Toward the end of the Odyssey (Book 23), Odysseus repeats Tiresias’s entire prophesy to Penelope, including the manner of his death.  His wife takes it as a good omen:

“And so,” Penelope said, in her great wisdom,

“If the gods will really grant a happier old age,

There’s hope that we’ll escape our trials at last. (Fagles translation)

But the Western world was not content for Odysseus to fade into a peaceful old age.  In the Inferno, Dante places Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell for his “horse’s fraud that caused a breach” and other deceptions, and out of the burning flame where he is locked for eternity, he tells Dante and Virgil that he couldn’t stand a peaceful old age in Ithaca:

Neither my fondness for my son nor pity

For my old father nor the love I owed

Penelope, which would have gladdened her,

Was able to defeat me in the longing I had… (Mandelbaum translation)

So, Dante’s Odysseus gathered up his old comrades (the few that were left) and told them they were “not made to give your lives as brutes” but to follow a higher calling – and they followed him right out of the Mediterranean, into the southern hemisphere, and to their death in an eddy of the deep sea.  And what is the lesson there?

The lesson for Tennyson, when he penned his great poem “Ulysses” was that old men should be adventurers.  He starts his poem with Ulysses being bored with a peaceful life in Ithaca:

It little profits an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren craigs,

Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws to a savage race…

And so he riles up the old guys to take to the sea again:

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,

One equal temper of our heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

There is a contradiction – the old men are to acknowledge what they “are,” but to override their age and weakness to strive and “not to yield.”  There is no acceptance here.  The deceptive Odysseus thinks he can somehow put one over on the natural order of things.  In our world of old men who seem determined “not to yield,” to fight one last war, and to build monuments of many kinds to themselves, Tennyson’s poem leaves a sour taste in my mouth.  “Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.  If some of these old men went a little gentler, whole civilizations might be saved.

I have not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s movie – I am waiting for it to come to my small screen where the violence will be less overwhelming.  It is my understanding that Nolan’s version has it’s very own ending, perhaps a little softened and de-misogynized for the modern viewer.  I will continue to believe that Tiresias knew what would and should happen.  Odysseus would turn his back on the sea, make sacrifices to appease the gods that haunted with him, and rule in Ithaca.  And then, like all men he would die.  And, like lucky men and women, he would die at peace with his family and the world.

For an excellent supplement to any reading of The Odyssey, try Helen Luke’s essay in Old Age: Journey Into Simplicity.   For reading about how The Odyssey can affect your life, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic and Norman Fischer’s Sailing Home: Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life are both highly recommended.  Keep a copy of The Odyssey close at hand when you are reading, of course!

 

 

 

 

 

What Abides (Into Old Age)?

What makes the 73-year-old me that I see in the mirror, that I identify as “me,” the same as the four-year-old in the picture on my desk?  No one would recognize me in the four-year-old.  Even I have trouble identifying what remains of her.  As we age, “what abides?” is a question worth pondering.  People try to answer it in different ways – some look up old friends, some write memoirs.  We all dread the loss of what we think of as our “selves;” I watched my mother turn into a different person in her late eighties, and yet she retained many early memories.  In fact, she seemed to live in her earliest memories.  What of her self was lost, and what remained?

These questions made me think of that old word: abide.  In old age, what abides?  What stays and makes us us until the very end?  Or is the concept of a constant being just fallacious?  In “Ulysses,” Tennyson posits that “much abides” in old age – that while the body fades and weakens, the will is strong:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” when he was a young man; I would posit that the admonition “not to yield” would not be the advice of an old man.

On the other hand, Thomas Hardy was around sixty when he addressed “abiding” into old age in “I Look Into My Glass:”

But Time, to make me grieve.
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

While Tennyson wants to concentrate on the value of what abides, Hardy finds it a form of torture, as his spirit wants to do what his body cannot do.  And then there is Robert Graves and his poem about looking in the mirror, written when he was about 72:

I pause with razor poised, scowling derision
At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,
And once more ask him why
He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption,
To court the queen in her high silk pavilion.

For Graves, what abides is “presumption.”  And more specifically, “a boy’s presumption.”

In its intransitive form (as used by Tennyson and Hardy above), abide means “to remain stable or fixed in a state;” this is the same as the meaning it takes in the great hymn, “Abide with Me.”  The tale is that the author of the hymn wrote it at the deathbed of a friend, a friend who asked him to abide with him until the end.  The Biblical reference is Luke 24:29. The disciples (after they had met the risen Christ) plead with Jesus: “Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.”  This is from the lovely King James Version; I would note that some later versions use the word stay rather than abide.   I prefer abide, which is related to the word “abode.”

This is an old problem.  The ancient Greeks pondered the problem of the Ship of Theseus.  As told by Plutarch in the first century, Theseus’s original ship was used for a ceremony commemorating his defeat of the Minotaur; over the centuries, almost every part of the ship had to be replaced, as it rotted and rusted.  A thousand years later, was it still really the Ship of Theseus?  Sixty-nine years later am I still my four-year-old self?

So, the question still is: What abides?  What abides when we walk with a limp, when we can’t remember the librarian’s name or where we put the library book?  What abides that can reassure us of who we are?  Tennyson would leave us with the impetuosity of youth; Hardy would have us the prisoner of passions we can’t act on; Graves chides us for presumption.  I firmly believe that something of value abides, and I spend a bit of time trying to winnow out the chaff to find it.