Odysseus was married to Penelope for years and years when he sailed away with Agamemnon to fight for Menelaus against Priam, Paris and their Trojans.
Paris stole Menelaus' wife--the most beautiful woman in all the world--Helen. To the Greek world this was a double-affront. Stealing a wife was bad. But betraying a gracious host was even worse.
Odysseus spent ten years fighting in Troy. And cursed by the gods, another ten years trying to get home to Ithaka and Penelope. Along the way, Odysseus was saved from drowning by a divine nymph, Calypso. Not only was she beautiful and ageless, Calypso also offered Odysseus immortality if he would marry her.
Odysseus was sorely tempted.
Who wouldn't be?
Even back then in Homer's time, there was ageism. And being ageless was a plus. Especially nymph-wise.
But Odysseus made, still, the tough choice to return to his wife, Penelope, who of course, wasn't ageless.
I think about this story of wandering as I sit in my office--perhaps the most beautiful office in all the world--in the small cottage on the sea that my wife and I bought back in 2020 and renovated to the marrow in 2022-2023
Being up here in Connecticut reminds me of Odysseus. Because we got here by the same forces that addlepated wily Odysseus.
We were wind-blown.
We had no map.
When Covid hit, our ship was at the mercy of Aeolus and we wound up here.
Not by design.
We were windblown.
Every day as the malefactors of great wealth call their workers back to offices that have been stripped clean of privacy, quiet, comfort, charm and dignity, we hear about demands on workers to return en masse to these offices because of this spurious reason or that.
But mostly because, I believe, this is a matter of control. When you're in the "office," you are "theirs." That's the way the forces of consolidated capital want things.
They want to own you.
My office is not large.
It's probably 12'x10'. And though I have natural light, I am in the basement with no view of the sea. I cannot hear the waves or the clang of the incessant buoy that sits a quarter-mile from our clapboard.
But as Hemingway wrote about in the story of the same name, it is a clean, well-lighted place. And it is mine. Surrounded by the things I love. Including a 1950s era IBM mechanical time-punch-clock that is about as loud as a tank battle in Kursk.
I sit in my office and I think about all those demands to return to a long noisy bench with picnic seating, not even a chair, not even your own work-station. With not even a concession to the needs of humans. Your own place. A single hook on which to hang your hat.
How much easier would it be for all these "leaders" to actually lead. To throw up some sheetrock and build a few hundred or a few thousand little rooms with a door and a place to put your feet up and think.
"That's too much money," they'll say.
"The doors will break down collaboration and communication," they'll claim.
Never calculating the cost of the noise and despair and disdain so many have for the offices they're being forced back into.
Imagine working in a place that treated you like a human.