Time and Myth Book

Lots of words around storytelling and the nature of life on earth...

Odysseus travels as far as Gilgamesh, and meets many wonders on his way, but he does not seek everlasting life. He seeks only to reach home. It is as though the quest of everlasting life were now a thing of the past, as though man hoped now only to come home and live a mortal existence.

Odysseus says: "Endure my heart. Worse than this you have endured." His journey is the journey of a man who knows death and who seeks to win his way back though death to life.

The journey begins in wonderland. It is a wonderland of death, where death is not only a danger but a lure. He meets lotus-eaters, a cyclops, a master of winds, cannibals, a witch, ghosts, sirens, sea monsters, a goddess. At one point he meets the ghost of Achilles who tells him that he would rather be a slave among the living than a king among the dead. Finally he comes on a raft to the island of a seafaring people. They receive him well and bring him safely home at last on one of their ships. Now he has reached the land of the living; he has overcome the fascination of death.

Let us imagine a man kissing the earth. The kissing of the earth is the relationship a man has to the earth, to the things and times of life, when he is whole. By itself the earth - the world of flesh, the world of intimacy and of the limits and failure of intimacy - is a world of aloneness. It is the man kissing the earth, the man and the earth together in the kissing, that is the world of all-oneness.

The world of aloneness is a hell; the world of all-oneness is a heaven. The earth is a hell for a man when he holds apart from it, a heaven when he kisses it.

There are 3 moments in our story: first, the re is a moment of crisis, a moment of dividedness, then there is a moment of withdrawal, a moment of aloneness; and then there is a moment of return, a moment of all-oneness. This is like the story of Gotama's withdrawal and return. There is first the kind of solitude one experiences when one is with others but is so divided that one is unable to be wholly with them. Then there is the kind of solitude one experiences when one is by oneself, sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy to be with oneself. And then there is the transfigured solitude one experiences when one is with others and yet with oneself, able to give them what they are and receive from them what one is. When we begin to speak of what they are and what one is, however, we are beginning to speak of what man is and are not far from speaking of what God is.