“Philosophy begins in controversy and doubt,” noted Hegel. “It begins with a question about itself.” The object of our inquiry is ever reconstituted beneath the shifting sands of our own mental geography. Discover a little more and it becomes immune to us once again like some great virus that can never be put to rest. Once we have pinned its head down and named it, somehow it always manages to slip away, like a serpent out the depths of mythical obscurity, ever eluding our grasp. Even the metaphor through which to describe the object of our quest remains in doubt like the riddle of the sphinx or the nature of a dragon. It is a mystery. But what is the nature of it?

So we return to the wisdom of David Byrne and the Talking Heads. “And you may ask yourself, how do I work this? And you ask yourself, where is that large automobile. And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife.”

And so we begin the day of our quest for truth with an anxious look in the mirror, like the morning of enrollment in a new school or the start of a new job. We do not know if we are to take the bus or drive, sail the seas or fly by air. We are simply unprepared - culturally, biologically, intellectually -, to know how to begin such a journey. The anxiety is made all the greater when we do not even know where we are going. All of this tends to make me want to stay in and sleep, as if there were some resting place to call home - whether on some island in the Mediterranean or back in my own longed for distant land with my own long lost love I somehow hope to recover. But is not humanity the species that has no home, that must forever remake ourselves and our shelters accordingly. When everything is so inextricably linked to everything else, it is simply impossible to demarcate the bounds of our quest with the arbitrary lines of some stale methodology. When the world is a web of inter-related occurrence, how could we ever pinpoint our end - as if once it were captured, it would not find some clever means of escape, like Odysseus in his own struggle with the Gods. For is not our end tied up with the ever changing fate of all other happenings.

Even the Gods do not know what is to be our end. We are simply too free to be pinned down like that. So how could we, from out of the obscurity of our limited minds, ever decipher our destiny? And yet we nevertheless throw ourselves into this work - the work of being human. Or we are thrown, for the truth be told, we have no choice but to rise from bed each morning and start the day.

And so it happens that almost 3000 years later, in the mind of Nikos Kazantzakis, Odysseus awoke from his originary quest. He had made it home and reclaimed his life after so many years of struggle. Sometimes we do find our way home. Yet somehow as always, life had transformed him and the world he called home. The envy of lost men throughout history, the restlessness could not be subdued. When he looked into the mirror of this world that once defined him, he no longer recognized himself.

“The things we now esteem fixed,” noted Emerson, “shall, one by one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall.” And so this modern day Odysseus fell out with his world. So sing to us once again, oh muse, of this man of many twists and turnings. “You may ask yourself what is that beautiful house?… where does that highway go to?.. And you may say to yourself, my God, what have I done?” And so he did - and left… “into the blue again, into the silent water.”

This man, who has somehow come to symbolize all humanity in its waywardness, found the journey to be more homely than his own destiny, than his own bed. And so he threw himself, “into the blue again… into the silent water.” And perhaps it is not by chance that I have yet to complete this near 800 page masterpiece of modern, epic poetry. For it is myth, and myths are forever renewed as generations struggle with their meanings. If humanity continues, the myth will be taken up again as future generations struggle to come to their own completion. Like philosophy, like the journey of our lives, the end remains obscure - hidden beneath unread pages, the tomes of history, the pulsations of our own hearts. We are the eternal cat who has finally caught the mouse and only seems able to withdraw in perplexity.

So philosophy having failed us, and the world of action being without known purpose, perhaps it is safest to come to our own temporary completion with the long words of the developmental psychologist, Clare Graves,

“At each stage of existence the adult man is off on his quest of his holy grail, the way of life he seeks by which to live… As he sets off on each quest, he believes he will find the answer to his existence. Yet, much to his surprise and much to his dismay, he finds at every stage that the solution to his existence is not the solution he has come to find. Every stage he reaches leaves him disconcerted and perplexed. It is simply as he solves one set of problems he finds a new set in their place. The quest he finds is never ending.”