Enduring Hardship
Odysseus survived war at Troy for ten long years just to be cast about at sea for years longer, losing one companion after another in various misfortunes. Eventually he came to be held captive by the goddess Calypso on the island Ogygia, where he would weep the day long on a beach, yearning for home. Calypso wanted him to be her eternal companion and offered him the chance to become a god, too. But “much-suffering Odysseus” (as the Homeric poems repeatedly refer to him) declined. Why? He didn’t just turn down eternal life. For the ancient Greeks, being a god meant the negation of all human suffering. Imagine, an eternal life filled with only good things, without a care in the world. Jean-Pierre Vernant (1991) describes the ancient Greek gods quite simply and elegantly:
Whatever positive forces, such as vitality, energy, power, and luster, the human body may harbor, the gods possess these forces in a pure and unlimited state. In order to conceive of the divine in its plenitude and permanence, it is therefore necessary to subtract from the human body all those traits that bind it to its mortal nature and betray its transitory, precarious, and unfulfilled character. (p. 35)
Of all people, you’d think this might appeal to much-suffering Odysseus—a chance to escape his tears and sorrow. But no, he turned down eternal vitality, power, and luster. And rather than be the paramour of a goddess, he wanted to be with his suffering mortal wife, Penelope, who was undergoing her own trials back in their home of Ithaka.
When you do take responsibility for pursuing this wisdom, your suffering will be endowed with meaning and become transformed.
Red-figured stamnos (jar) showing Odysseus and the Sirens. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Used by permission under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
I’ve pondered on this a long time. What does Odysseus see in his suffering? Given the choice, why would he choose to be (and be with) a suffering human? The more I thought about the gods in Homer’s poems, the more I began to understand that they don’t have all good things. In fact, having virtually all the good things in the world and never suffering is the reason why they can’t ever achieve the one good thing they lack: emotional maturity. The Homeric gods have been described as possessing a “sublime frivolity,” which is actually horrifying. Having nothing much better to aspire toward and nothing of real consequence to lose, they have no reason to mature. On top of that, being self-sufficient entails that gods don’t really need one another. It may come as no surprise, then, that they are hopelessly egocentric. When offended, a god might skin the offender alive without even a small pang of empathy. On the rare occasion a god’s ambitions are thwarted, the god feels no real distress, but goes off to find some more pleasant distraction, like feasting, making love, or simply “exulting in their glory.”
Now be honest, have you ever avoided coming to terms with failure by distracting yourself with food, sex, or narcissism? Unlike Homer’s gods, you can’t escape the sources of your suffering forever. The suffering you feel may be beckoning you to walk the path it has cleared toward an emotional maturity and human wisdom. When you do take responsibility for pursuing this wisdom, your suffering will be endowed with meaning and become transformed. Consider this excerpt from C. P. Cavafy’s poem Ithaka (trans. E. Keeley):
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
References/Recommendations
Homer. (2018). The Odyssey (E. R. Wilson, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Vernant, J.-P. (1991). Mortals and immortals: Collected essays (F. Zeitlin, Ed.). Princeton University Press.
