La Jornada: Ithaca is not on the map

There are times when the world It is more fragile. Periods of collective uncertainty where old certainties stop working. Years ago the Berlin Wall fell and the famous american dream It has become a nightmare for thousands of migrants and a global threat.

To try to inhabit ourselves in the midst of the storm, it is convenient to return to the primordial story of survival in the West: the Odyssey of Homer, as Christopher Nolan has just done with his film.

In a world that idolizes speed, that converts greed into ambition and that resolves its conflicts with a click or a missile, the old Homeric poem in its 24 cantos displays an ethical “countermap” of surprising relevance.

Far from being an academic fossil, the Odyssey is a profound meditation on human resilience.

I am glad that Nolan’s film has turned a cinematographic event into a phenomenon of literary consumption. According to Circana BookScan, global sales of all editions of the work have accumulated 76 percent more so far this year and, only the increase in physical sales in England, according to NielsenIQ BookData, skyrocketed by 1,400 percent. In terms of audiobooks, Spotify reported an increase of 310 percent.

The Italian writer Italo Calvino recalled in his essays that a classic never finishes saying what it has to say because it speaks directly to our darkest present.

In these times of hardship, the most dangerous temptation is escape: the sirens of oblivion or the apparent comfort of Calypso’s island, where immortality is offered in exchange for renouncing one’s own destiny and return. But Odysseus rejects Calypso’s static eternity because he prefers her mortal, suffering and true condition. He wants to return to Ithaca, he wants to recover his place in the world, his identity, his affections.

The first warning comes to us from slowness. It takes Odysseus 10 years to return to Ithaca. But each delay – an island, a goddess, a monster – is a lesson the hero must decipher. In the culture of immediacy, where we demand instant responses and rewards without waiting, Odyssey vindicates the value of what matures. The return is not a procedure; It’s a job. Faced with the tyranny of the “now”, the poem whispers that there is knowledge – mourning, intimacy, justice – that is only revealed to those who know how to delay.

Then there is the fierce criticism of greed, that engine that today plunders resources, makes lives precarious and empties democracies. Penelope’s suitors are not only mythological antagonists: they are the portrait of a predatory elite that devours other people’s property while courting power. Homer calls them “proud” and “without measure.” In times of obscene inequalities, the image of these men feasting at the expense of others is disturbingly familiar.

In the face of violence, the poem proposes an alternative that our time forgets: intelligence against brute force. Odysseus does not win by muscle, but by metis, that cunning that devises speeches, disguises and stratagems. “I am Nobody,” he says to the Cyclops, and in that verbal occurrence lies salvation.

While our present often applauds the bully praised in bullfights, the media executioner or the leader who confuses harshness with authority, Homer remembers that true human power is the word, the strategic imagination, the ability to construct a story and not only to impose a heavy hand. The cold head.

There is, finally, a teaching about identity. Odysseus loses everything – ships, companions, honor – and arrives in Ithaca disguised as a beggar. His definitive triumph is not the sword, but recognition: the boar’s scar that reveals him, the olive bed that only he and Penelope know.

In an era where we are diluted in avatars, digital noise and showcase biographies – anyone is a historian –, the Odyssey It questions us: what makes us unrecognizable to our own? Where is our intimate Ithaca, the one that no algorithm can plunder?

Homer did not write a political treatise. He wrote a song of survivors that still names us. In the face of vertigo, he proposes perseverance; in the face of plunder, measure; in the face of blind force, tenacious intelligence. Perhaps, after all, Ithaca is not a point on a map, but that human dignity that should not be lost while we sail, dazed and fast, towards nowhere.

Read today Odyssey It reminds us that being lost in the “wonderful sea,” as the blind poet refers, is not equivalent to being defeated. That the shipwreck, the detours and the wait are an indivisible part of the journey. Faced with the immediacy of our era, Homer proposes active patience and trust in intelligence: the certainty that, even when the waves break the ship and the sirens sing in our ears, there is always the possibility of clinging to a piece of wood and continuing rowing towards the shore.