Have you ever had one of those nights sitting in front of the television, engrossed in some show, when you look at the clock and wonder where in the world the time went? Hours have passed without you moving an inch. Or maybe you got up to briefly get something to eat, but the show went on, and it brought you along with it. Two, three, four, maybe even five or more episodes pass before you are brought back to reality, as if having woken from a dream.
Maybe you’re not a TV person, so you can’t relate. But what about at work, when things are particularly slow, and you pull out your phone to check your social media. A glance turns into a trance, and before long you realize you just spent the last fifteen minutes mindlessly scrolling through a feed you care nothing about. Maybe YouTube is your kryptonite; or video games.
It doesn’t have to be a screen, though. Many people have gone days, months, and even years of their lives wondering where the time went. Maybe it was the drudgery of work that stole all their attention. Or maybe it was the lack of work, the sheer boredom of life, that kidnapped any robust sense of time gone by.
Whatever experience of distraction from life you’ve had, and however long its lasted, you’ve tasted the sweet lure of Calypso. Remember Calypso from Part One? The goddess whom Odysseus lived with for seven years. The one who provided him immortal rest from the many burdens at sea he had just barely escaped. And who offered him everlasting relief from the responsibilities he would surely face were he to return home to Ithaca. None of us can avoid landing on Calypso’s island every so often. It is inevitable. But we are all at risk of staying on her island. You see, Calypso is a derivation of the Ancient Greek word καλύπτω (kalyptō), which means to hide or conceal something. To get stuck on Calypso’s island is to lose yourself. It is to forget or to reject the burdens and responsibilities of life for a false promise of relief.
Calypso is the land of distraction. And the distraction is nothing less than a date with death. When we distract ourselves or become distracted for prolonged periods of time, lost, as it were, in the land of forgetfulness, we fall prey to death’s most alluring disguise. Distraction will surely promise freedom from responsibility, but always at the cost of your life. Odysseus taught us as much.
Life is only intelligible when we can clearly see and identify its opposite, as it threatens us in the form of disease, decay, destruction, and, you guessed it, distraction. To stand before these adversaries, to confidently face and resist them, is to choose life. To willfully or forgetfully succumb or surrender to these adversaries is to temporarily lose your life, as you are overcome with despair, depression, and desperation.
Odysseus leaves Calypso knowing he will one day die. But until that day of fate comes, he will stand confidently on life’s sturdy ship and face death’s temptations armed with courage and resolve. God forbid he throw away everything that makes him human to prematurely perish on the island of Calypso, hiding from his mortal nature. Only in the face of death does life make sense. Once you fall into death’s deceiving grasp, in this case, the “immortal” life that Calypso promises, life disappears. Death must always be before us, staring us in the face, as we battle against its devices, if we want to truly live.
If Odysseus is a mythical model of mortal man, Socrates is our real-life guide. Socrates’ sea was Athens in the fifth century, and his Calypso was the ever-threatening temptation to lose himself in the humdrum of daily life. That’s right. Socrates is profoundly normal. His life would be considered by any modern account boring. He didn’t travel. He didn’t have political pedigree (an important social symbol at that time). He was a normal guy, living a normal Athenian life, when he decided to leave Calypso’s island behind.
All around him, he noticed men and women walking about, going about their business, with no real direction or destination. They acted like they knew what they were doing and where they were going, but their aimlessness was exposed as soon as Socrates asked them revealing and reflective questions. They would get lost, frustrated, and defensive. This was Socrates’ strategy to help wake people up from the dream that shielded them from reality. The false comfort of knowledge that insulated them from a world of uncertainty. Or the superficial allegiance to work that drowned out the world around them.
He disarmed them by asking them simple questions, the answer which, if answered honestly, would pull the veil from their eyes. Why are you doing that? What is your purpose? Where are you going? How ought we to live? All of these questions, if answered honestly, would disclose the true nature of life’s fragility. So they rejected and ignored them, content to persist in ignorance that operated under the guise of knowledge. Socrates, on the other hand, chose to face his mortality, accepting his inevitable death, and thus truly lived. Those around him, denying their mortality, died an early death. Death by distraction, despair, or denial.
The irony of Socrates is that he was condemned to die because he helped people live. The city of Athens claimed that he was disturbing the youth, causing unrest among the citizens by asking them questions that might make them leave Calypso’s island. A place of false security, safety, and calm. A place where people go to die long before they have drawn their last breath.
What we learn from Socrates is that if you want to really live, you must face death head on. You can be sure that it will unleash its limitless quiver against you, or it will try to quietly deceive you into complacency, forgetfulness, and sleep. And one day, it will certainly win. As it does for everyone. But until that day you must face it with vital resolve, like Odysseus and Socrates, to defeat its traps and tricks with courage and wisdom.
To live is to face death honestly and to resist its allure. To fall too early into its snares, to fall while you still have breath in your lungs, is to fail to live.
Philosophy beckons each of us, everyday to awaken to a world of wonder. And inspired by that wonder to discover who we are. And on our journey of discovery to withstand the raging sea that threatens at every turn to cast us on to Calypso’s shore.