Lecture 3

Paradise Lost: The Price of the Passport

   Attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is maybe the most precise and profound metaphor of life one can encounter in so few words. He wrote that we never step into the same river twice. Stop for a moment and think about those words. What do they entail? If you return to the same river bank on the Volga, how is it not the same river? If it is not, what changed? One way to view the statement is that the water constitutes the river-ness of the river, not the banks of the river, and, since the water is ever flowing to the sea, the river has changed. This is certainly one way of expressing the fact that all things are flowing, that we live in a constant flux of change. But there might be another way of seeing the same thing.
     Let’s say that we visited the river together last summer and had a picnic there. The time on the river is the culmination of great conversation, of getting to know one another for the first time. The hours spent there watching the sun go down and the sky light up with the cloudy fire of sunset seem to italicize everything good about budding friendships and human communities. Soon the time to leave arrives and we part ways in the night, remembering every thing about the time. A year passes and we make plans to meet again, reenacting the events of the first summer. We even plan to end on the same note, picnicking on the Volga. Do you suppose that you will be able to have the same experience, even when all the people participating are the same? Even if the weather is exactly the same, the food and drink the same? What changed in the intervening year? Of course, you changed. There is no going back to the same place, because we cannot go back to the past.
     Great literature frequently entails stories about the passing of time and the effects the ensuing experiences have on the characters. These stories are not all tragedies either. Yet the passing of time means a loss of those moments that make up the present, where we live our lives. Let me tell you about two of the oldest stories in literature.
     The ancient epic of Gilgamesh, a story dating back to the third millenium B.C. of Babylon, and the earliest epic of the West, tells the story of Gilgamesh, half god, half man and his friendship with Enkidu, half man, half animal. Before the two meet is a time of innocence, before love and loyalty, before death and their final parting. They become friends and then immediately set out on an adventure, meeting with evil, overcoming fear and loneliness on the way to their ultimate meeting with death. Gilgamesh has learned what love is, and what the price of love is. It costs him everything, but in the end, he knows he would pay the price all over. The story is told with all the inevitability of an enduring myth, the stories that lie at the heart of the human experience.
     The other early story is not so old, but set in a Garden made by God for Man. The first man and the woman are innocent. They are untouched by loss. They lack experience. After breaking the one law they are given, they enter into a new period, suffering the loss of home, the loss of innocence, but they gain the world. It is not the same world they inhabited before, it is the human world of love and pain and loss. In these stories there is no going back. The Paradise of inexperience is permanently lost.
     Other losses are recounted in literature, and one of the most intense is the loss of innocence that war brings on. The opening of The Iliad is full of exuberance even after ten years of siege against Troy. The men are hopeful and ever plotting. Of course, there are those who would just as well go home without having victory, but for the most part the captains of the Greeks, Achilles, Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, they are all most happy to let the war continue. For it is in the fight, confronting death, that they believe they will win glory immortal.
     But later, in The Odyssey, one of the great generals of that war recounts the overwhelming sacrifices made to win. Here is where the story picks up, with the Telemachy. The 20 year old son of Odysseus has decided to find his father whom he cannot remember. He knows that Odysseus is a hero, for he has heard all the stories over the 20 years that Odysseus was gone. He, too, thinks that exploiting a place, an opportunity will allow him to live on forever. But this is not the lesson that he learns in his brief search.

The Odyssey, Homer. Books 3 and 4
www.bartleby.com/111/chapman16.html

     First he travels to Pylos where he meets the great old general Nestor. He wants to find out all about his father. But what he hears about is much more than that. Nestor cannot speak long about the war. For him, it was the defining time of his life. He and all the others who fought there know that life will never be the same, no matter what the outcome was. What is the general lesson that Telemachus learned from this visit to Nestor.
     Later, he travels to Sparta to meet with Menelaus and his famous wife and the cause of the war, the beautiful Helen of Troy. What does he come away with there? What is the tone of these visits? What could Homer want to teach us about “never stepping into the same river twice?” Was it worth it in the end to fight the war?

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