Ulysses, Telemachus, and the Naked Body Alone in the Universe Against its Own Best Time

I wrote this post in March 2007, nearly two years before becoming a father. The cousin whom I wrote about here died six weeks after this post appeared.

Another busy Monday morning finds me sitting at the messiest desk in the Western Hemisphere. Really, it’s appalling — Clif bar wrappers and old tests, coffee-stained handouts and framed wedding pictures all jostling together. Merely to type a post or an e-mail requires blowing the crumbs off the keyboard. (I need a new keyboard annually, thanks to the food and drink spills).

I’m thinking this morning about a dear relative of mine. Because it’s a private family matter, I won’t share much, but I will say that this relation is a man in his mid-seventies, now suddenly frail and weak and battling serious illness. Though his physical diagnosis isn’t immediately terminal, he seems to have lost much of his will to live. I am praying and meditating for him daily.

This man and I have had a lot in common for many years. My relation was the first endurance athlete I ever knew; he started marathoning in the 1970s, back when the sport was first becoming popular. He ended up doing more than 80 marathons, as well as several Ironman distance triathlons (including a strong finish in the Hawaii Ironman back in the very early years of the event.) He was a great bear of a man, not terribly fast but with a tremendous will to compete and and a tremendous capacity to live with physical pain — two things any serious endurance runner must have. He gave me lots of good advice when I first became a distance athlete, and in many ways, has been an athletic role model for me for more than twenty-five years.

What he and I share, more than a love of sport itself, is an intense desire to maintain our own autonomy and to pursue self-perfection through the endless disciplining of our own flesh. So much of our identity is built around the very satisfying thought that we do things other people can’t do. While others sleep in, we push our bodies to their limits, always seeing what else we can do to improve. And while there is much that is praiseworthy about this tremendous longing to achieve maximum fitness and performance, there’s a dark side to all of this as well. At its worst, this addiction to endurance sports can isolate us from others, cause us to ignore social and familial responsibilities, lead us to prioritize logging miles rather than spending time with those who love us most.

Berkeley-born Sharon Olds’ most famous poem is surely the marvelous Sex without Love. I loved it the first time I read it, largely because it was as close to a perfect description of how my companions and I lived out our erotic lives in our twenties as anything I’ve ever seen. And as a man who was both sexually promiscuous and athletically obsessive, I recognized myself at once in the closing lines:

They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

I long ago surrendered my sexuality to God, and gave up “sex without love.” I have received indescribable gifts in return. But I struggle, Lord how I struggle, not to think of myself as going through life as a solitary runner, alone in the world, always racing against my own best time. The danger for distance athletes, both world-class and amateur, is that we can become profoundly selfish. Beating “our own best time” becomes the one meaningful battle in our lives. We discipline ourselves with restrictive diets, we beat up our joints on endless hills, we drag ourselves out of bed hours before dawn to do solitary combat on the roads and trails and treadmills. And if we’re not careful, we mistake the pursuit of our own individual excellence with authentic virtue.

Authentic virtue is never selfish, as Aristotle and a hundred other wise folks have pointed out. Authentic virtue is about balancing one’s own need to endlessly recreate and improve with one’s responsibility to the world at large. If our running gives us great pleasure, but leaves us so drained and self-absorbed that we are less available for our loved ones and our community, then we’re not being virtuous. We have to make choices, and in the past couple of years, I’ve made that choice. Many folks think I work out a lot (14-20 hours per week). But that’s nothing compared to what I would do if I gave up more of my outside commitments! Oh, how I long to take eighteen good months and train for a solid 100-miler. But running 120 miles per week would take too much from my wife, too much from my chinchillas, too much from my students and my youth group, my seven classes, my mentees, my colleagues.

The greatest danger for distance athletes, however, isn’t that we become selfish. The greatest danger, one that I see in the life of my ailing relation, is that we become so enraptured by our own physical capabilities that we begin to believe we are radically autonomous. Our bodies do such incredible things, and bring us such pride and satisfaction, that we start to think we’re indestructible. We become particularly loath to rely on others, jealously, often pridefully guarding our own independence. The phrase “our bodies, ourselves” takes on a radically different meaning: our identity as human beings becomes enmeshed with our sense of what our bodies can do.

We came into this world naked and helpless. We had no control over our flesh; we were diapered and dressed and spanked and bathed and fed on another’s schedule. We wailed and flailed, but for the first few years were utterly incapable of meeting our own needs. And unless we are taken young and suddenly, most of us will leave the world in that same way. Even if we retain the ability to use the toilet and feed ourselves up until the end, old age will rob us, sooner or later, of our precious independence. If we’ve spent fifty or sixty years building up a personal myth of indestructible autonomy, “alone in the universe against our own best time”, we’re going to be absolutely devastated by the slow surrenderings we will inevitably have to make as we age.

I’ve posted a bit about my Dad lately. His dying was relatively quick last year; he got the terminal diagnosis in mid-April and he passed on on June 22. A gentle man, not in the least concerned with “personal best times” or “faster and farther”, he surrendered himself easily to his caregivers. He was uncomplaining as he slowly lost his abilities to do for himself what he had done for nearly seven decades. He maintained his dignity and his sense of humor, and above all, he maintained his sense of self even as his body shriveled. My father, a philosopher by training and a wise soul by natural temperament, knew that he was not his body. While he had a hard time accepting the soul as separate from the flesh, he knew that his “Hubertness” was not defined by what his muscles and bones could do. That knowledge gave him the strength to surrender gently when his time came.

My ailing relative, my fellow endurance athlete, is not going so gently. He’s raging against the dying of the light. For him, the “light” remains connected to what his body can do, and losing those capabilities is devastating for him in a way that it wasn’t for my far-less competitive father. As for me, I have had both these dear men as role models all of my life. Though there is much I owe to my Dad, and though I love him still with all my heart, I did not get my manic restlessness from him. That longing I have to climb the next mountain, and the next, and the next, until I reach the final summit from which there is no descent — that obsession comes from somewhere else. My cousin has it in him; his were the first pair of eyes in which I saw what I so often see when I look in the mirror: the sense that life is a constant struggle against weakness, against darkness, against our own sense of limitations. And when at last our limitations overwhelm us… it’s hard.

On the list of the hundred most famous English-language poems, Tennyson’s Ulysses must rank near the top. I first read it in college in a frosh Comp Lit class. I loved it then and love it now, and remember fighting with my Marxist TA who insisted that it was the “Ulysseses” of the world who were responsible for colonialism and imperialism and slavery. She hated the poem (and hated Tennyson) and wanted her students to mock the sentiments within it. I nearly lost my temper, so eager was I to defend both the poet and his protagonist. And I think of Ulysses often as I think of my dear cousin, fighting so hard in his hospital bed.

Ulysses was a lousy husband, to put it mildly. He wasn’t much of a king either, if we take Tennyson’s view — he has no interest in doing what his son Telemachus does:

…by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness…

Ulysses is not centered in that sphere of common duty; he hears a different call:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!

It’s whopping hubris to compare oneself and one’s relations to the ancient heroes, of course. But when I think of my father, I think of one very gentle, loving, devoted Telemachus. My God, Dad was “strong in the sphere of common duties”! Though he was not a political man or a natural leader, he was a pillar of his family and of the broader community; the hundreds and hundreds of mourners at his memorial service were all touched and moved by him. In my life, especially since his death, I’ve sought to become more and more of the sort of man he was. Kindness and grace came naturally to my father, and I long to emulate him in those virtues.

But my cousin and I — like so many of my friends in the endurance running community — have the restlessness of a Ulysses. We are the ones who find “how dull it is to pause, not to shine in use.” And though we don’t kill monsters, we devote our lives to killing our own limitations. Contentment scares us; complacency unnerves us; we embrace domesticity with often considerable unease. We are capable of common duties, but we’re not centered there. Our center is always a mile further up the trail.

Near the end of the poem, Ulysses says:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are…

That which we are, we are. I am thinking this morning of a man I love and admire, lying in his bed four hundred miles from here. A man who has climbed mountains, swum through oceans, run marathons on five continents. For him, the great question is finding the will to live now that so much has been taken. The question for him is whether “much abides”, and whether or not what remains is enough to continue to live.

Those with the spirit of Telemachus have an easier time letting go. They give up the bicycle, the running shoes, the car keys. They may mourn the loss of their independence, but they haven’t staked their identity to their autonomy the way those with the spirit of Ulysses have. And as one who struggles to reconcile his inner Telemachus with his inner Ulysses, I have much to think about this morning.