Fragment (I can imagine another Odyssey)

In the Odyssey, as things stand, Odysseus and Penelope could never again be happy together. Perhaps that explains the poem’s unsettling and unsatisfying ending. After years of waiting and anxious expectation, they would find themselves the same, and the paradox that made Odysseus leave home in the first place —because only a very naïve reader would think that he actually cared about the whole Helen affair— has remained unresolved. Odysseus leaves home because Ithaca had become impossible, but if he always planned to return, then Ithaca would never become possible again. I can imagine another Odyssey, however, in which Odysseus leaves without knowing what will happen. Penelope too shares this not knowing, and as such she picks among the suitors the one —or the ones— she likes best, and spends her days in happiness sometimes and in sadness others, as she sees fit; never forgetting Odysseus but not consumed by his memory either. Odysseus fights in Troy and when he leaves he does not try to guide home his vessel, but rather lets the ship run free, like Zhuangzi’s sage. He too, forgets Penelope but does not forget her, and lives his days in happiness and sadness as they come, visiting many foreign cities and meeting wise men and sea-nymphs. Then one day, after one of his countless shipwrecks, he finds himself on a desert shore. It takes him a while to recognize that it is his Ithaca. He walks up to the palace in a daze, unrecognized by everyone. When he enters the Great Hall he finds Penelope alone: she has lived out the loves that she built with the suitors of her choice and now she is once again free. As he approaches her she recognizes him immediately —the scenes of the bed and the scars, of course, remain intact— but she does not throw herself at him, nor he at her. They are mature enough to know that instead they should greet each other as friends. As such, Odysseus asks the Queen —for when he left for Troy he had, by necessity, to renounce his kingdom— permission to stay as her guest. Penelope grants him this wish. Over the next few months —or the next few years: my Greeks have medical science comparable to that of our age— they spend time with each other, they talk until late at night, they go on long walks on the beach, they listen to the bard sing. Perhaps they even share a night or two in their well-rooted bed. And then one day, when they have gotten to know each other again, one day, when least expected, they find themselves lovers again. Ithaca has once again become possible. At the bottom of their hearts, they both always hoped for this, but this was a hope that included in itself a certain kind of renunciation: it wouldn’t have mattered if things had been otherwise. Friendship would have been enough, and it is precisely this understanding of the contingency of their love what allows it to flourish again. Only then, I think, could Odysseus and Penelope live out their years together.