I’ve started a listen-through of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey on Audible. The introduction alone is fascinating (2+ hours), setting the background that modern readers/auditors need to understand the far-off world and time of the narrative: how does the concept of [in]hospitality, “xenia”, drive the epic narrative of both the Iliad and the Odyssey? “If a face could launch a thousand ships…”

This may relate to why I’m doing a bit of recreational emacs/geeking in the past few weeks. Wait…

At the start of the narrative Odysseus is given the chance to become immortal and to live in a blissful paradise with one restriction: he can never go home to his beloved mortal wife Penelope. This, it turns out, is one of the many violations of xenia we see the narrative. Odysseus, predating Arwen in the LOTR by several thousand years essentially says “I choose a mortal life”, builds his raft and heads off for, well, an odyssey of trails, pain, loss and eventual death. Why?

He seems to have an incurable need for things to be put back exactly the way they were before he went off to fight in the Trojan War approximately 20 years earlier; he wants his wife back, he wants his (now 20 year old) son back, he wants his place of status in his home and city (Ithica) back … just like time had never passed. I think there’s some of that in all of us.

So, Emacs ?!?!

I’ve been using it for over 45 years. It has been a tool for coding, a way to organize life, a means of communication, an odd insider-joke that only the most geekly of my friends get. In some weird metaphorical way it is $HOME. It’s a place where I control things. It’s a place where I can both relax and get things done. Given a break from two years of a lot of helping family members with health issues and doing way too much to keep on top of insurance, finances and organizing two major family trips I’m crawling back in and just “being” for a bit.

Time passes for all of us. You can never really go home. Things are never really the same, but sometimes you can just enjoy where you are.

I recommend Homer (and Gilgamesh). You’ll see odd echos of yourself there as people have been doing for thousands of years.