Beyond Homer. Benjamin W. Farley
with a whimsical smile, put her hands up to my face, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed me hard on the mouth. “Ummmm,” she moaned. “I’ve got to get back to my own man. I want to be there when Carl gets home and dig out his day with Gibert. I think I’ll take the metro at the Opera,” she pointed. “You’ve inspired me to paint again.” There was a luminous glow about her face. “Oh, Lord! I almost forgot.” She reached in her handbag and handed me a paperback book that was soiled and worn. It was a copy of Carl’s From the Minoans to Homer. “He said for me to give it to you. We’ve got a few extra copies, so don’t worry.”
I accepted the book and turned thoughtfully through several of its brown-edged pages. “Please thank him. I’ll start reading it again, tonight.” I looked desperately into her dark eyes. I wanted her to know how smitten I was with her, how fortunate and lucky I felt, just being with her.
“I’d better go,” she repeated. “What’s your phone number?”
“I’ll write it down.” I took out our lunch receipt and scribbled down the pension’s number. “The concierge answers all calls, but she’ll call me to the phone if I’m there.” I handed it to her. “What’s yours?”
“I’d better keep that a secret,” she looked away apprehensively. “Carl does get jealous. It would be better for me to call you.”
“Julene! There’s still more of Paris to see, and I hardly know you.”
“Or I, you.” She stared at my collar and straightened my tie. “I’ll call you. That’s a promise.”
I put my arms around her waist. She slipped free, smiled, and disappeared down the street in the bright haze of the sun’s orange glare.
3
After returning to the pension, I became restless. I emptied my jacket of its contents, flopped on the bed for a while, then paced in the semi-darkness of the room. I paused to look out the opened windows. A veil of fog hovered about the roofs and buildings in front of me. I leaned out over the narrow balcony and stared down at the street below. The drone of the traffic and the constant and magical pace of the city’s life rose and throbbed unabated. It echoed off the rusting balconies along the street, down which I gazed in reflection. Afternoon shoppers and tourists walked briskly toward the street’s corner, across from which stretched the Garden of Luxembourg. I picked up Sullivan’s book, replaced my billfold and passport in my jacket’s inside pockets, pulled it on, and descended the stairs for the park.
Near one corner of the garden, a statue dedicated to Baudelaire had become my private haunt for those inner dialogues with the self, for those quiet moments with the psychosphere, when one requires escape and self-examination. I took a seat on a concrete bench and opened Sullivan’s book to his section on “The Myth of the Minotaur.” I read the following:
The story of the Minotaur is at once transparent and aretetical. Prior to investigating either of these poles, let us relish the myth anew. Having achieved acclaim by the time of his arrival in Athens, and having survived his father’s wife’s treacherous wiles, Theseus turned his attention to the dreadful calamity that annually numbed the city. At that time, the Athenians were compelled to send a tribute of seven maidens and seven youths to King Minos, ruler of Crete. Minos offered them as a sacrifice to the Minotaur: a grizzly monster with a man’s shaggy head and the body of a bull. The Minotaur roamed a vast labyrinth, known for its numerous and terrifying passageways that snaked endlessly beneath the palace. Daedalus, himself, had constructed the maze. Once victims passed through its entrance, none returned or escaped. Theseus convinced his father, Aegeus, to let him go as one of the seven sacrificial youths that he might slay the Minotaur. With a father’s anguish, Aegeus conceded. Theseus promised to change the ship’s sail from black to white, upon his return, if the adventure produced success.
Upon their arrival, the fourteen victims presented themselves to Minos. The king announced his satisfaction and set a date for the sacrifice. His daughter, Ariadne, however, became enamored of Theseus—the manliest of the youths—and he equally fell in love with her. The night before the ordeal, she managed to steal into his chamber and give him a magical sword and a spool of thread, the first with which to kill the monster, the second to retrace his steps to the entrance. Taking the lead as they entered, Theseus cornered the beast, slew it, and, with the help of the thread, saved the maidens and other youths. As Greek myths go, however, victory and prowess, valor and bravery, are inevitably accompanied by treachery and grief. On the return voyage to Athens, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the Island of Naxos, and, forgetting to raise the white sail, arrived in port under the mournful black canvas. Upon seeing it, Aegeus fell on his sword and died.
I folded an edge of the page down and closed the book. Now would come Sullivan’s reflections on the myth. In his Introduction, he had warned readers of a fondness for a methodology he intended to use ad nausea, if necessary, to ferret out the truth behind and between the lines of the stories. He never followed them in any particular order, but employed them with ingenuity and resourcefulness. Six motifs guided his approach. The first had to do with the transparent, or the historical kernel, to be identified. What was the story’s “setting in life,” or its Sitz im Leben? Could a date be determined on either archeological or historical grounds? A cognitive, or intellectual, thread formed a second concern. What does the story explain? What dimension of life does it elucidate? What intellectual enlightenment does it provide for understanding the self or the world? The aretetical, a third, had to do with value, excellence, or virtue. What insight into life’s conduct does a myth possess? What virtues did it hallow for its ancient audience? What lingering aretetical values might it still convey? A fourth motif, he identified as deontological. Deon means “duty” in Greek. What were the duties to be gleaned from the myth? What further duties might human beings salvage from the story for today? Sullivan argued that a distinction between aretetical and deontological is important, since virtues are often highly winsome and admirable, but difficult to attain, whereas duties are essential to rights and concepts of justice. He proposed that this was as true of the classical period as of our own. At some point, a fifth motif involved catharsis. Sullivan acknowledged his debt to Aristotle for catharsis. Beholding how others have suffered and borne life’s vicissitudes, as well as feeling a shared pity and dread with others, strengthens our own capacity to endure personal tragedies and private sorrows. This is especially so, since our own problems will go unsung and unheralded. To know that some are recorded and memorialized in dramatic epics provides a mantle for our own fleeting existence. They cloak our mortality with the solace of a universal immortality of the human spirit. Finally, but not always, Sullivan would sometimes address the ontological problem. By ontological, he meant something of the metaphysical. What does any myth or story tell us about the mystery of being? As in dreams and repressed fears, does the myth proffer a peek into the troubled subconscious, which, if we could probe and understand it, would bring us closer to the truth of our elusive humanness: that daunting mystery that still exists?
I was about to reopen the book, when a premonition of not being alone began to pulse from synapses to synapses, causing me to look up with a startle. Standing near the edge of the monument, the Viet Cong soldier, whom I had heard the previous evening, was staring at me. He wore a dull, silky green shirt, blue jeans, a Bolshevik cap, and sandals. A leather pouch, with long straps, teetered on his right shoulder. “Bonjour, may I join you?” he said in crisp French.
I knew what he wanted. For the past six months, a small legion of Vietnamese from the North had been in Paris, propagandizing any Americans they could.
“Why not?” I replied. “But it won’t be any use, I fear.”
“Please. Let us be at peace! At least, hear my side.”
He slipped the pouch off his shoulder and produced several printed articles. I had seen them before, sometimes in restaurants where Americans gathered, or along the Seine near the waste bins, or on park benches.
He sat next to me and handed me three folded sheets. They were printed on both sides and contained the “history” of the recent conflict, its sufferings and illegality from the North’s point of view, and the multitude of ills that wars of liberation and revolution spawn. The pages