1,000 Ships

I've had a hard time finding the motivation to write as of late. It's hard to find things worth writing about anymore. That which is worth the effort is too personal to be published here.

I finished reading Margaret George's "Helen of Troy", one woman's imagined account of Helen's life, from her childhood in Sparta to her death of old age. Since there is no historical record of Helen or even of Troy, this is pure fiction based on what we know of Mycenaean culture at the time and the other writings about the Trojan War. Few ever really delved into Helen herself, and even fewer explored what her life was like after the fall of Troy. Naturally, that's the part that has always intrigued me. To scratch the surface of the story, you have a woman who has been trapped her entire life by her seemingly unparalleled beauty. Then for no apparent reason she shirks her crown, her husband, and her daughter to run away with a man half her age. She brought brought with her destruction on literally a legendary scale.

While I disagree with George's portrayal of Helen as a hapless victim of the god's wills, it does at least give credence to the fact that human control only extends so far. We can only control so much of that which surrounds us. According to the story, the Trojans assumed that no one would actually make a war over a woman, let alone a war that lasted over ten years.

The novel touches on several issues, the most glaring is of child-parent relations. Helen questions her lineage to Zues and distrusts him, while Aphrodite claims Helen as her daughter in spirit, though Aphrodite repeatedly abuses Helen and sends her on a path of destruction. The characters are constantly working to right their parent's wrongs, to avoid their parent's fates, and to generally separate themselves from their parents. It is in this constant effort that they lose themselves and tumble along the paths set for them anyway.

More interesting and more subtle is the implication, especially in the end of the novel, that there are two kinds of people in this world: The first is the most common; people who live ordinary, happy lives interspersed with brief moments of sadness and trial, but otherwise their days are peaceful and unexceptional. Then there are those who live lives of tragedy; these are people who fight their entire lives for few fleeting moments of peace and joy. Everything is a trial, a test. Nothing can be simple for them as it is for the first people. They labor for just those brief moments, and those moments have a sweetness the first people cannot fathom. And then the moment is gone and it fills them with an emptiness that only they can understand. They can never get these moments back, no recreation will suffice. Their lives are a series of tragedies interspersed with shining moments of triumph, but the shine quickly fades.

But the latter are strong, they are the survivors. They experience unparalleled joy and unparalleled sadness. The former live in a happy ignorance of what they're missing.

At the end of the novel, Menelaus prays that his grandson never becomes a hero and lives a simple, peaceful life. Helen prays the same. However, it is not what either wished for themselves. They both surrendered great things to live lives of tragedy. Helen voluntarily walked away from her own daughter for just a wisp of the kind of rapture she instinctively knew she was missing. Menelaus sat on the beaches of Troy with his countrymen while doing so plunged his nation into depression for over a decade for one day to triumph, to be a hero. These people wish simplicity on others, but not on themselves.

And so I sit here looking out over a cloudy bay and at pictures of a place in the woods I will probably never see again, and I think about those I have loved and lost. I think back on a life I used to have and I wonder if there is anything I could have done to keep it. I wonder what steps I could have taken to maintain those relationships, to keep that happy ignorance. But I look in the mirror and I know I was only ignorant for brief flashes, that I've always known it would be this way. Like Helen, I prefer the struggle because I know on some level there is a greater prize for greater hardship.

If I can just get over this next obstacle, I can see what awaits me on the other side.