The Odyssey: The Road Not Taken

[Spoilers Ahead for those who haven't watched Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey]

Last week I ended up watching Nolan's The Odyssey in IMAX (as Nolan and the Internet intended it).

Reactions have been numerous but for this Backyard Izakaya moment, I'd like to focus on Matt Damon's Odysseus as he's ruminating on that beach with Calypso for seven years. Here's a man who has stopped in his journey but never stopped looking at the sea. In fact, in most of the scenes, Calypso and Odysseus aren't as much talking to each other as it is Odysseus narrating his inner turmoil with Charlize Theron's Calypso as his sounding board.

Everybody holds that question at some point: the decision to stay or to go. Should I stay where I am or should I go to where I think I need to be?

This Backyard Izakaya article isn't really about answering that - I'm not sure anybody can. This is about the tension you carry, when you're standing at the fork, before you've moved at all.

The lotus flowers are a reminder to forget. The cost has been so high that the honest answer is that it's more bearable and in some ways, better, to forget the unfathomable scope as to what was lost.

You've made it this far, so staying is grit, right? It's plowing through despite the circumstances. You're the one people count on when the tough gets hard and hard gets insurmountable. It's cold, raining and 4 A.M. and not a speck of sunlight, but you do it anyways because this is who you are.

Staying is putting down roots. Like a tree, the longer you stay, the taller you grow, and the more the wind finds you. This compounded with what was already lost makes this all seem a sunk cost that you're gritting through to make it worth it.

But that's only one part of staying. There's another part that is more dangerous. The wind suddenly stops and everything is … fine.

Calypso's island is a visceral paradise. He is offered immortality there — stay, and never age, never suffer, never die. But it isn't home; it isn't Ithaca. Nobody warns you about the staying that's comfortable. The island doesn't hold you with chains; it holds you with everything being fine.

This type of comfort is mentioned in Michelle Obama's Becoming, as she writes about her mother who every spring in Chicago — after a hundred days under that iron-gray lid of a sky — would quietly entertain the thought of leaving her husband. Just spending a warm day spring cleaning with the windows out of their frames, imagining other lives she might have lived, and then fitting every window back in, emptying the bucket into the sink, because "once again, you've made the choice to stay." Staying, it turns out, isn't a decision you make once. It's a contract you renew — quietly, privately, sometimes alone, with the leaving-dream folded inside it like part of the ritual.

Michelle's mom spends her springs imagining an island somewhere. Odysseus spends seven years on the island imagining an ordinary home. Each one dreaming of the other's prison.

In the Odyssey, he knows exactly where he's going. Ithaca. The clearest destination a man has ever had — and it buys him nothing. Ten years of wrong turns, detours and unpredictable fatal tangents.

If even after seven years, he is still ruminating on this mythical Ithaca, it is not just a seven year itch he's experiencing with Calypso. It's something he already had in him long before he came washed on her shores. It's a man's character, his soul and no amount of lotus flowers can get rid of that.

If Odysseus has in fact decided that the right decision is for him to leave, how will he know once he has found what he's looking for? Do I only find out when I arrive whether this is where I'm meant to be, or whether this is just who I am?

At the end of Past Lives, there is an idea I keep returning to: the person someone once knew no longer exists, because you're the kind of person who goes. By definition, Odysseus is someone who leaves, and if that's who you are, then of course you go. You can't stay.

So Ithaca it is. But once he has found this mythical Ithaca that he's been longing for so long, will he just leave again?

The catch is that the home we come back to isn't the same one we left twenty years ago. Too much has passed and while Odysseus's tranquil kingdom still lives in his mind, the reality is that it no longer exists. If he can handle the rift between what he thinks it is and what it is now, then he has a real chance of getting home; something he can't even comprehend until he gets there.

So he builds the raft, log by log, on the beach of a paradise he's leaving, with no idea what's waiting. Going doesn't mean returning — going means finding out.

I feel like I just said a lot and also nothing at all. But maybe the something is the tension itself — staying and going, the thing people quietly negotiate every single day. On the commute of a crowded train on a Monday morning. Or a Tuesday night at 9 p.m. when nothing particularly interesting is happening. Every one of those an unremarkable little spring morning where, without ceremony, you make the choice again.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and we took the one less traveled by, and that's a decision you make over and over and over again.

But has it made any difference at all? Who knows. I'll let you know when I get there.

Savoring this moment with you,

Kevin L