The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus after the Trojan War, of his trip home to Ithaca to his loving wife Penelope and son Telemachus. Odysseus had to leave to fight the day Telemachus was born, and hadn't seen his son in ten years of long siege, losing thousands of soldiers and a number of his friends. He had offended Poseidon, though, and the god of the sea wanted Odysseus to suffer. It took ten more years before Odysseus finally made it home, along the way dealing with the Cicons, the lotus-eaters, a cyclops, a hurricane, Circe, a trip to Hades, the Sirens, the Scylla and Charybdis, his ship struck by lightning so that he was the sole survivor of his crew, and avoiding the nymph Calypso who offered immortality if he would forget Penelope, before finally being rescued by the Phaecians and returned to Ithaca just in time to fight with Telemachus all the nobles of his homeland who were trying to lay claim to his lands, throne, and wife. It's a hell of a story.

The movie version we'd watched cut out only a couple of the adventures of which Homer originally told. Toward the end of the show (and it's been ages since I've read the Odyssey, and I don't remember if Homer wrote these words or not), Odysseus said to Penelope that what a man could hold and do with his own hands is more beautiful than anything he could take with a sword or a long-spear. In essence, a man's world is his accomplishments, not his spoils or possessions... life is living, the journey, the odyssey... a man's heaven and a man's hell is what he makes of it.

Thus the hero of the Odyssey is... a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send.... He has surpassing arete... a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life... which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

Stout heart? Check. Broad wisdom? I've been told that (though don't necessarily feel I use it), so check. Endure without complaining? Do writing my fears and doubts in this journal count as complaining? I hope not! Still, enduring is something I've not been doing much of late. I've been worrying about life rather than living life. A person in Odysseus' time who sat around being depressed would be put to death by his master or his enemy.

Surpassing arete... that's the goal.

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