Yesterday I was out on my porch deadheading the purple petunias with AirPods in my ears when I heard a loud clap—someone trying to break through my reverie—I’d been listening to a book on Audible, oblivious to my surroundings. It was about Nazi- occupied France in WW II, and I wondered if there is any value to cracking open your heart on injustices you can’t stop or retroactively heal.
Watch the news much?
I glanced up, and there was a young guy in a t-shirt and ballcap passing by who had been trying to get my attention. I pulled out one earphone, cocked my head, and he yelled, “Turn around!! A fox is standing RIGHT behind you!”
I turned, and there indeed was a beautiful red fox up on the porch, close enough to touch. Part cat, part dog. Mythological. Apparently, the creature had been watching me from the front door mat for several minutes, but when I turned, he ran, flowing like water, as red as the brick porch steps, disappearing around the boxwoods.
It was my writing day, and though I published a book full of them, I’m not a huge fan of writing prompts and never use them myself. “Write about ice cream,” they’ll suggest. “Write about being scared.”
I’m scared of ice cream you write. Because it seems stupid and artificial, and ice cream is not in your heart at the moment. But as I walked back into the house and upstairs to my office, I thought: “Write about a fox.”
Beautiful, wild, unexpected, and the possessor of quintessential skills.
A fox has the best hearing of any mammal in the animal kingdom. He can hear a mouse burrowing under three feet of snow from 100 feet away. He can hear a watch tick from 40 yards. He can sense the earth’s magnetic field, allowing him to target a pounce while hunting with lethal efficacy.
And we love quintessential skills and characteristics—those representing the most perfect example of a quality. Best of the best. Quintessentials become code for the thing they embody. Brilliance, resourcefulness, cleverness. He’s an Einstein, a Houdini, a real Sherlock Holmes. Or like Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s new movie. Of all the warriors in the kingdom, only Odysseus can string his bow.
“Write about a hero.”
A man who spends ten years fighting a war in Troy and another ten getting home is surely the quintessential warrior, and Ann Hathaway is the quintessentially resolute wife. While Matt Damon’s character struggles to return, 30 to 40 suitors are vying for Hathaway’s hand in marriage –lolling about the castle, feasting at her table, drinking her wine, waiting for the moment she’ll weaken and pick a new king. But she resists.
The suitors are super-frustrated.
(But are they? A decade or two sprawled at the castle with the bros is not such a bad gig.)
I have to confess that I had read bits of the Odyssey without ever sitting down to read Homer’s epic poem in its entirety. And I was an English major. My bad.
There are witches and monsters, a Cyclops and a lethal whirlpool, but what costs Odysseus the most is the seduction of the lotus eater. For seven years, Matt Damon hangs out on a beautiful island with Charlize Theron, who keeps feeding him lotus, which makes him forget (almost) that he was on his way home.
Sure, it was the lotus…
The breeze in her hair, the surf lapping at the shoreline, the eye contact…does he really not remember where he was going…? When he gets home, he’s going to have some explaining to do… Because how many men would leave Charlize Theron on an island paradise for Anne Hathaway in a dark boozy castle… well, one, apparently.
Quintessential love. We aspire to it.
Quintessential characters appeal because they have no gray area. They are flawlessly faithful, brave, committed, and brilliant. They aren’t going to disappoint or surprise us.
Like real people do.
Or maybe it’s that we love quintessentially, but we are never put to the test. We don’t actually know whether we’d wait 20 years, what we would forgive, or what we would sacrifice. Our lives simply don’t require us to prove ourselves.
Yet we are certain we would die for our children. Would give a loved one a kidney. And I remember a time when, if one were needed, I’d have offered my heart. I distinctly remember thinking, “If it ever comes to that, take mine.”
“Write about being human.”
That’s a different story. We are often ambivalent. We mean well. We fall short. It makes love a risk we take, over and over, even knowing that whatever love we possess, we will one day relinquish.
Maybe that’s our superpower.
We trust that in ways we can’t quite understand, this all makes sense. Our messy, relentless love. Our faith that the design of the universe just beyond knowing is perfect.
I don’t know of anything much braver than that.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
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2 Responses
Just a thought: Even if you have never truly read Homer’s Odyssey, read Madeline Miller’s Circe and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad. Odysseus has undergone quite the revisioning of his character since high school when it was required reading in my curriculum. His treachery, violence, deceptions and real lack of devotion to Penelope do catch up with him. And about those women; In an interview, Nolan addresses the fact that he minimizes major female roles from the Odysssy in his movie and highlights Odysseus’ exploits in order
to economize.
I noticed that about the minimizing of female roles and those are great suggestions. Thanks for writing, Jane!