The Value of Not Knowing
An Excerpt from We First Met in Ithaca, or Was it Eden?
“After the suitors were dead and their relatives pacified, Odysseus and Penelope resumed their conversation in the immovable bed he had crafted from a living tree. It was a symbol of their union. She pressed him for more details about what Tiresias had told him in the Underworld, the prophecy that he would have to leave again soon, on a new quest ordained by the gods. She wondered how much time they would have together before he left again.
“Athena had rejuvenated him for his reunion with Penelope, making him as young and strong as he had been twenty years before. But he knew that was temporary. He would soon be as old as before, or the gods, with their love of irony, would make him even older. He believed that, as Tiresias had told him in the Underworld, he would have to leave again, but he didn’t know if he would return home this time, and if he did, how much time would have passed. He and Penelope might be old and frail by then, perhaps too old to remember each another or to even remember their own identities. He wanted to spare her the anguish of imagining that.
“So, he lied to her, as he had before and she to him. That was part of their unique bond, their likemindedness. He told her that Tiresias had promised him that he would return soon from this second journey, and then their happily-ever-after would begin.
“A week later, an unmanned ship pulled into the Ithacan harbor. Crowds gathered on the shore and stared in fear and amazement. A priest of Poseidon sacrificed two bulls but received no sign, no explanation for this mystery ship. No one dared board it. The ship stayed near the dock, without ropes or anchor to hold it in place. Finally, Odysseus dared to jump from the dock to the deck, alone. On shore, there was no breeze, but the sails filled with a strong wind, and the ship pulled away, heading out to sea.
“Penelope, Laertes, Telemachus, and all the assembled townsfolk screamed, begging Odysseus to jump off and swim to shore. Instead, he grasped the mast and shut his eyes, remembering the time when his crew had tied him to a mast so he could resist the lure of the Sirens’ song. He knew he had to go on this second journey. He accepted his fate.
“Years later, he washed ashore in Sicily, a frail old man, barely breathing. Fishermen found him, put him in a cart, and took him to the king. Before he died, he revealed, ‘I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, father of Telemachus, from Ithaca.’ Then he pleaded that no one send word of his death to Penelope. He wanted her to believe he was alive and might return any day.
“Nevertheless, the king sent a ship to Ithaca, with Odysseus’ ashes, and with a detailed sketch of the scar on his leg, as proof of his identity.
“Penelope was shocked. She had suspected that Odysseus knew when he left that he could never return. His lie that they would once again be reunited was his gift to her, the gift of ignorance, of uncertainty. So long as she didn’t know for sure, to her he was still alive, perhaps immortal, and she could imagine their future together. But now these ashes and this undeniable evidence of his death erased all hope.
“When Athena learned of this disclosure, she granted Penelope the gift of forgetting, and for the rest of her days, she recognized no one and didn’t even know who she was. Then Athena bestowed the gift of ignorance on all mankind. From that time on, when people died, their bodies vanished. There were no funeral pyres, no grave mounds, no certain knowledge of death.
“And so it was for three score and ten generations, until the gods themselves all died, including Athena.”
