It is suitably ironic that one of the most poignant, and pertinent, moments in Homer’s The Odyssey was airbrushed out of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. The first time we meet Odysseus, the endlessly resourceful architect of the fall of Troy, he is indeed weeping on the shores of the nymph Kalypso’s island. But it is not due to the unrelieved guilt he feels from his war crimes; rather, we are told, “his tears never did dry, since the sweetness of life was trickling away / As he grieved for his return home” (Book V.153).
For the immortal goddess had kept the mortal Odysseus for seven years, not in a prison, but in a paradise, an Eden-like cave warmed by fire, lined with fragrant trees, filled with carnal delights.
Each night, Kalypso — unageing and beautiful, whose figure is described as “being in full bloom” — would sleep with Odysseus (“he unwilling, she all too willing”) and promise him at once agelessness and unending pleasure if he would but remain with her in her cave. Depart for Ithaca, “the land of your fathers”, she warns, and not only will he have an inferior wife awaiting him, but he will endure unimaginable hardship on his journey home. Since we are given a god’s-eye tour of Kalypso’s cave before we learn of the choice being put to Odysseus, surely the unequivocal nature of his response is meant to surprise — even though without it, there would be no story!
Given the choice between immortality and solidarity with the hardships and daily joys of the world, Odysseus chooses the world, and death with it. “Such simple greatness is foreign to our minds today”, writes Albert Camus; “we simply lack the pride of the man who is faithful to his limitations — that is, the clairvoyant love of the human condition.”
Increasing numbers of us seem prepared to turn our backs on the world in order to remain in Kalypso’s cave. Sometimes, this takes the form of attempts to so optimise the body that it defies, or indefinitely postpones, ageing and death (Bryan Johnson has become the face of this fanatical project, suspended as it is between ascetic self-discipline and transhumanist experimentation). For others, the more modest gains in longevity and good health into our eighties and nineties have made us more determined to hold onto power (here Rupert Murdoch would be one of any number of octogenarians who refuse “succession”).
For all the ambition and self-importance that both tendencies project, there is something rather small, even petty, about the fear of accepting one’s limits, of ceding one’s power. By denying death and grasping tightly to what we’ve accumulated, we hope to remain significant. It is a human impulse immediately recognisable from Shakespeare’s Lear, and should invite our pity if its consequences for our common life weren’t so dire.
As Samuel Moyn and Lucinda Holdforth have both argued, the refusal of human limits expressed in this determination to extend our lives and our influence comes at the expense of the young. Not only is their disenfranchisement fuelling a certain generational resentment, it may also represent a deformed moral conception of the proper end (telos) of human life. To adopt an old Rabbinical analogy, is our life meant to be a sponge that absorbs as much as possible, or a watering can that progressively pours itself out for the sake of others?
This is no argument to consign the old to a state of “uselessness”, to collectively deem them at a certain age as surplus to requirement. (The monstrous vision of Christopher Buckley’s satirical 2007 novel Boomsday was that government incentives should be given to Baby Boomers to kill themselves once they reach 75.) But perhaps the sense of importance, of usefulness, can be reimagined by learning how to be faithful to our limits, by acquiring Odysseus’s “clairvoyant love of the human condition”.
Guest: Lucinda Holdforth is a former speech writer and adviser to senior leaders across government and business. As an author, her work has increasingly focused on what makes good societies flourish. Her most recent book is Going On and On: Why Our Longevity Threatens the Future — you can read an edited extract on ABC Religion & Ethics.
PLEASE NOTE: This episode of The Minefield contains discussion of death and dying.
