I have been reading the Return to Ithaca recently. There is probably more emotion and beauty in those last books of the Odyssey than in most of more recent literature.

When Ulysses descends in the underworld to question Tiresias, he meets with his mother’s ghost. Like every good mother she first tells him off for having gone to Hell. And then she sets him back on the upward path to life with a single sentence: “Son, hasten to the light, with all speed”.

It is a potent image: the carnal source of everyone’s earthy existence sending one back to life, away from even the most intimate memories.

It reminded me of words we know from Deuteronomy 30:19 : « I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants”.

And I thought – Anticlee is our witness, and Ulysses is our witness – those are not religious words, those are the secular ones we tell ourselves, as each other’s contemporaries, when facing ghosts in hell: “choose life”.

Image credit : Cathrine Ertmann