I recently watched the film The Odyssey written and directed by Christopher Nolan, epic in narrative, grand in visuals, a rendering of one person’s seemingly endless struggle to reclaim home and identity. This story, attributed to the poet Homer, the author credited with the two foundational stories of Greek literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, appeared during the early archaic period of ancient Greece. The term archaic does not suggest primitive or unsophisticated; rather, it is the name historians give to the formative period during which many of the institutions and intellectual traditions we associate with Greek civilization emerged.
During this broad period of early Greek culture, the maxim Know thyself became associated with the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where ancient sources tell us it was inscribed alongside other Delphic maxims. Its precise origins are uncertain, although tradition associated it with the Seven Sages of Greece. Centuries later, through Socrates and Plato, the maxim became deeply associated with the philosophical pursuit of self-knowledge, examining one's beliefs, motives, ignorance, character, and ultimately the nature of the self. We can view the journey of Odysseus through the lens of this lifelong voyage of understanding the nature of self, including how lost a person can become in that quest. And Western literary culture has been explicitly wrestling with the concept of self-knowledge for at least 2,500 years.
I have been contemplating loss and grief recently, thrust upon my personal family life by a recent tragic loss of a beloved family member, and this has led me to again examine my own sense of self. As part of this process, I am reading and listening to many ideas, voices, and experiences of this very human, undesirable, and unavoidable experience. The formative effects of grief on one’s identity, building it, shaping it, and modifying it, reflect grief’s central role in the human experience, perhaps an inescapable consequence of these fundamental drives of being human- to connect and to be connected.
This imperative to connect has biological, developmental, psychological, and existential correlates. It may be that to know oneself represents a fundamental human inward movement, and to be known by another, to connect with another, a fundamental human outward movement. Perhaps there is a third fundamental human movement-the recognition of how deeply the two are intertwined. In this, the process of grief can be understood as not a one and done, but an ongoing process that animates life in the form of shaping the self as it unfolds, alone and in relationship to others, and for as long as one lives.
In the contemplative traditions we explore the self in part as the lens through which we encounter experience. Sitting in meditation, we bring awareness to the physical sensations as we encounter our internal and external environments. We notice the emotional tone of experience and the thoughts that quickly follow, narrating what has just happened almost as if a momentary transmission delay were playing our experience back to us on film.
And yet I cannot help but reflect on a thread of the self that seems to run true from my earliest memories to my most recent encounters. Yes, I have grown, learned, experienced losses, successes, joys and sorrows, and undoubtedly endured many changes. But I am still that same person who sat in the bathroom on a stool looking at a picture book and watching my father shave as I was when holding my first-born moments after his birth, or as I am now sitting in front of this MacBook and typing these words.
There might be another way to understand Odysseus's journey home. The person who returns to Ithaca can never be the same person who left it. The journey has changed him. Loss has changed him. The people they have loved and lost have become part of who he is. And yet the one who returns is, somehow, still Odysseus.
Perhaps, then, to know thyself is not to discover some fixed self hidden beneath experience, nor to conclude that there is no enduring self at all. It may be to become intimate with this paradox: that we are continually being shaped by those we love, by what happens to us, and by those we lose, while experiencing some thread of continuity that allows us to say, across all those changes, this is still my life. Grief may make returning to the home we knew impossible. But perhaps the human journey is not a return to an unchanged home or an unchanged self. It is learning to inhabit the person we are becoming while somehow recognizing the person who has traveled the whole way with us. Perhaps that, too, is a kind of homecoming.