MOST OF MY CHILDHOOD IN TEL AVIV was spent in silence: I hardly ever asked questions. Not that I wasn’t curious. Of course I wanted to find out what was kept locked away in my governess’s pyrographed box next to her bed or who lived in the curtained trailers stranded on the beach of Herzliya, where I was sternly warned never to wander. My governess would respond to any questions carefully, after what seemed to me unnecessarily long consideration, and her answers were always short, factual, disallowing argument or discussion. When I wanted to know how the sand was made, her answer was “of shells and stones.” When I sought out information on the dreadful Erlkönig of Goethe’s poem, which I had to learn by heart, the explanation was “It’s only a nightmare.” (Because the German word for nightmare is Alpentraum, I imagined that bad dreams could take place only in the mountains.) When I wondered why it was so dark at night and so light during the day, she drew a series of dotted circles on a piece of paper, meant to represent the solar system, and then made me memorize the names of the planets. She never refused to answer and she never encouraged questioning.
It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that questioning might be something else, akin to the thrill of a quest, the promise of something that shaped itself in the making, a progression of explorations that grew in a mutual exchange between two people and did not require a conclusion. It is impossible to stress the importance of having the freedom of such inquiries. To a child, they are as essential to the mind as movement is to the physical body. In the seventeenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that a school had to be a space where the imagination and reflection were given free range, without any obvious practical purpose or utilitarian goal. “The civil man is born, lives, and dies in slavery,” he wrote. “At his birth he is sewn into swaddling clothes; at his death he is nailed into a coffin. As long as he retains a human form, he is chained up by our institutions.” It is not by training our children to go into whatever trade society requires, Rousseau insisted, that they will become efficient in their tasks. They have to be able to imagine with no constraints before they can bring anything truly valuable into being.
One day, a new history teacher began his class by asking us what we wanted to know. Did he mean what we wanted to know? Yes. About what? About anything, any notion that occurred to us, anything we wished to ask. After a startled silence, someone lifted his hand and posed a question. I don’t remember what it was (a distance of more than half a century separates me from that brave inquisitor), but I do remember that the teacher’s first words were less an answer than the hint of another question. Maybe we began by wanting to know what made a motor run; we ended by wondering how Hannibal had managed to cross the Alps, what gave him the idea of using vinegar to split the frozen rocks, what an elephant might have felt falling to its death in the snow. That night each of us dreamt his own secret Alpentraum.
Ulysses: Know the whole world.
—SHAKESPEARE, Troilus and Cressida, 2.3.246
The interrogative mode carries with it the expectation, not always fulfilled, of an answer: however uncertain, it is the prime instrument of curiosity. The tension between the curiosity that leads to discovery and the curiosity that leads to perdition threads its way throughout all our endeavors. The temptation of the horizon is always present, and even if, as the ancients believed, after the world’s end a traveler would fall into the abyss, we do not abstain from exploration, as Ulysses tells Dante in the Commedia.
In the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, after having crossed the dreadful snake-infested sands where thieves are punished, Dante arrives at the eighth chasm, where he sees “as many fireflies as the peasant, resting on a hilltop, sees”: they are souls who are punished here, eternally consumed in whirling tongues of fire. Curious to know what one particular flame is “that comes so parted at the top,” Dante learns that these are the entwined souls of Ulysses and his companion Diomedes (who, according to post-Homeric legend, had helped Ulysses steal the Palladium, the sacred image of Athena on which the fortunes of Troy depended). Dante is so attracted to the horned flame that his body leans involuntarily towards it and he asks Virgil’s permission to address the fiery presence. Virgil, realizing that, as Greeks, the ardent spirits may disdain to speak to a mere Florentine, speaks to the flame as a poet who “when on earth wrote lofty verses” and begs that one of the two souls will tell where they met their end. The larger tongue of the flame responds and reveals itself as Ulysses, whose words, legend has it, could bend the will of his listeners. Then the epic hero whose adventures were the source of Virgil’s Aeneid (Ulysses left the sorceress Circe at the island of Gaeta, he says, “before Aeneas gave that place its name”) speaks to the poet he inspired. In Dante’s universe, creators and creations construct their own chronologies.1
The character of Ulysses can be seen in the Commedia partly as the incarnation of forbidden curiosity, but he begins life on our shelves (though he may be older than his stories) as Homer’s ingenious and persecuted King Odysseus. Then, through a series of complex reincarnations, he becomes a cruel commander, a faithful husband, a lying con man, a humanist hero, a resourceful adventurer, a dangerous magician, a ruffian, a trickster, a man in search of his identity, Joyce’s pathetic Everyman. Dante’s version of the Ulysses story, which is now part of the myth, concerns a man not satisfied with the extraordinary life he has led: he wants more. Unlike Faust, who despairs at how little his books have taught him and feels he has at last reached the limits of his library, Ulysses longs for that which lies beyond the end of the known world. After being freed from Circe’s island and Circe’s lust, Ulysses senses that there is in him something stronger than his love for his abandoned son, his aged father, his faithful wife back in Ithaca: an ardore, or “ardent passion,” to gain further experience of the world, and of human vices and virtues. In the course of only fifty-two luminous lines, Ulysses will try to explain the reasons that drove him to undertake his last journey: the desire to go beyond the signposts Hercules set up to signal the limits of the known world and warn humans against sailing farther, the will not to deny himself the experience of the unpeopled world behind the sun, and finally, the longing to pursue virtue and wisdom—or, as Tennyson put it in his version, “to follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”2
The columns that signal the limits of the knowable world are also, as all professed limits, a challenge to the adventurer. Three centuries after the Commedia was completed, Torquato Tasso, a devoted reader of Dante, in his Gerusalemme liberata had the goddess Fortune lead the comrades of the unfortunate Rinaldo (who must be rescued before Jerusalem can be reconquered) along Ulysses’ path up to the Pillars of Hercules. There an infinite sea stretches out beyond, and one of the comrades asks whether anyone has dared cross it. Fortune answers that Hercules himself, not daring to venture out onto the unknown main, “set up narrow limits to contain all daring inventiveness.” But these, she says, “were scorned by Ulysses, / full of longing to see and know.” After retelling Dante’s version of the hero’s end, Fortune adds that “time will come when the vile markings / will become illustrious for the sailor / and the recalled seas, kingdoms, and shores / that you ignore will too be famous.”3 Tasso read in Dante’s account of the transgression both the marking of limits and a promise of adventurous fulfillment.
The twinning of the curiosity that leads to travel and the curiosity that seeks recondite knowledge is an enduring notion, from the Odyssey to the Grand Tours of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fourteenth-century scholar known as Ibn Khaldun, in his Al-Muqaddima, or Discourse on the History of the World, noted that travel was an absolute necessity for learning and for the molding of the mind because it allowed the student to meet great teachers and scientific authorities. Ibn Khaldun quoted the Qur’an: “He guides whom He will to the right path,” and insisted that the road to knowledge depended not on the technical vocabulary attached to it by scholars but on the inquisitive spirit of the searcher. Learning from various teachers in different places of the world, the student would realize that things are not what any particular language names them. “This will allow him not to confuse science and the vocabulary of science” and help him understand that “a certain terminology is nothing more than a means, a method.”4
Ulysses’ knowledge is rooted in his language and in his rhetorical ability: the language and the rhetoric bestowed upon him by his creators, from Homer to Dante and Shakespeare, from Joyce to Derek Walcott. Traditionally, it was through this gift of language that Ulysses sinned, first by inducing Achilles, who had been secreted at the court of the king of Scyros to escape the Trojan War, to join the Greek forces, which led to the death from a broken heart of the king’s daughter Deidamia, who had fallen in love with him; second, by counseling the Greeks to build the wooden horse by means of which Troy was stormed. Troy, in the Latin imagination inherited by the European Middle Ages, was the effective cradle of Rome, since it was the Trojan Aeneas who, escaping the conquered city, founded what was to become, many centuries later, the core of the Christian world. Ulysses, in Christian thought, is like Adam, guilty of a sin that entails the loss of a “good place” and, consequently, the means of the redemption brought on by the commission of that sin. Without the loss of Eden, Christ’s Passion would not have been necessary. Without Ulysses’ evil counsel, Troy would not have fallen and Rome would not have been born.
But the sin for which Ulysses and Diomedes are punished is not clearly stated in the Commedia. In the eleventh canto of the Inferno, Virgil takes time to explain to Dante the nature and place of each sin of fraud punished in Hell, but after locating hypocrites, flatterers, necromancers, cheaters, thieves, simonists, panders, and barrators in their proper places, he dismisses the sinners of the eighth and ninth chasms as simply “the same kind of filth.” Later on, in the twenty-sixth canto, describing to Dante the faults committed by Ulysses and Diomedes, Virgil lists three: the trick of the Trojan Horse, the abandonment of Deidamia, and the theft of the Palladium. But none of these leads precisely to the nature of the fault punished in this particular chasm. The Dante scholar Leah Schwebel has provided a useful summary of the “slew of prospective crimes for the fallen hero, running the gamut from original sin to pagan hubris” imagined by successive readers of the Commedia, and concludes that none of these plausible interpretations is ultimately satisfactory.5 And yet if we consider Ulysses’ sin as one of curiosity, Dante’s vision of the wily adventurer may become a little clearer.
As a poet, Dante must construct out of words the character of Ulysses and the account of his adventures, as well as the multilayered context in which the king of Ithaca tells his story, but he must also, at the same time, refuse his ardent storyteller the possibility of reaching the desired good. Travel is not enough, words are not enough: Ulysses must fail because, driven by his all-consuming curiosity, he has confused his vocabulary with his science.
Because Dante the craftsman has to submit to the adamantine structures of the Christian Otherworld as a framework for his poem, Ulysses’ place in Hell might be largely defined as that of a soul who is guilty of spiritual theft: he has used his intellectual gifts to deceive others. But what has fueled this trickster impulse? Like Socrates, Ulysses equates virtue and knowledge, thereby creating the rhetorical illusion that knowing a virtue is the same as possessing that virtue.6 But it is not in the exposition of this intellectual sin that Dante’s interest lies. Instead, what he wants Ulysses to tell him is what drove him, after all the obstacles Neptune set up on the return voyage from Troy, to sail not home to his bed and hearth but onwards into the unknown.7 Dante wants to know what made Ulysses curious. To explore this question, he tells a story.
Throughout our convoluted histories, stories have had a way of reappearing under different forms and guises; we can never be certain of when a story was told for the first time, only that it will be not the last. Before the first chronicle of travel there must have been an Odyssey of which we now know nothing, and before the first account of war, an Iliad must have been sung by a poet who is for us even fainter than Homer. Since imagination is, as we have noted, the means by which our species survives in the world, and since we were all born, for better or for worse, with Ulysses’ “ardore,” and since stories are, from the very first campfire evenings on, our way of using imagination to feed this ardore, no story can be truly original or unique. All stories have a quality of déjà lu about them. The art of stories, which seems not to have an end, in fact has no beginning. Because there is no first story, stories grant us a sort of retrospective immortality.
We make up stories in order to give a shape to our questions; we read or listen to stories in order to understand what it is that we want to know. On either side of the page, we are driven by the same questioning impulse, asking who did what, and why, and how, so that we can in turn ask ourselves what it is that we do, and how and why we do it, and what will happen when something is done or not done. In this sense, all stories are mirrors of what we believe we don’t yet know. A story, if it is good, elicits in its audience both the desire to know what happens next and the conflicting desire that the story never end: this double bind justifies our storytelling impulse and keeps our curiosity alive.
In spite of being aware of this, we are more concerned with beginnings than with endings. Endings we take for granted; we even sometimes wish for them to be eternally postponed. Endings tend to comfort us: they allow us the pretense of conclusion, which is why we require memento mori—to remind us of the need to be conscious of our own end. Beginnings trouble us daily. We want to know where and how things start, we seek wisdom in etymologies, we like being present at the birth, perhaps because we feel that what comes first into this world justifies or explains what comes afterwards. And we dream up stories to give us starting-points towards which we can look back and feel a little more secure, however difficult and questionable the process. Dreaming up endings, instead, has always seemed easier. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily,” Miss Prism tells us in The Importance of Being Earnest. “That is what Fiction means.”8
The fiction of beginnings is a complex invention. For example, in spite of the countless narrative possibilities offered at the start of the Bible, it is other, more explicit stories that provide the religions of the book with a beginning. Two narratives of creation follow each other in the first pages of Genesis. One tells that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (1:27). The second, how God, in order to provide Adam with “an help meet,” made him fall into a deep slumber, took out one of his ribs, and from this “made he a woman” (2:18, 21–25). Implicit in the divine creative act is the subservient function of women. Countless biblical commentators explain that this is the reason why a woman, as an inferior being, must obey a man; fortunately, a number of others reinterpret this patriarchal reading in a more egalitarian light.
In the first century C.E., the Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria, curious about the double narratives of Genesis, proposed for the earliest biblical narrative a Platonic interpretation, suggesting that the first human created by God was a hermaphrodite (“male and female created he him”), and for the second a misogynistic reading in which the male half is conceived as superior to the female. Philo identified the male half (Adam) with the spirit (nous) and the female one (Eve) with the physical senses (aesthesis). Severed from Adam, as if she represented sensation severed from reason, Eve is denied, in the act of creation, Adam’s primordial innocence, and thus becomes instrumental in the Fall of humankind.9 Two centuries later, Saint Augustine, in his literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, reinstated Eve’s primordial innocence by declaring that in the first narrative, Adam and Eve, still unnamed, were created with all their spiritual and physical characteristics in potentia, that is to say, present in a virtual state that would flower into material existence, as described in the second narrative.10 That is what you call having your original cake and eating it too.
Scholars more or less agree that the book of Genesis was written in about the sixth century B.C.E. Some three centuries earlier, in Greece, Hesiod reported a different version of the story of female culpability. Zeus, Hesiod tells us, furious at Prometheus for having robbed the gods of the Olympian fire and given it to humankind, decided to avenge himself by sending down to earth a beautiful maiden, crafted by Hephaestus, dressed by Athena, adorned with gold necklaces by Peitho and with garlands by the Horae, and with her heart filled by Hermes with lies and misleading promises. Finally, Zeus bestowed upon her the gift of speech and the name Pandora, and presented her to Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus. Forgetting Prometheus’s warning never to accept a gift from Olympian Zeus, Epimetheus fell in love with Pandora and took her into his household.
Jean Cousin the Elder, Eva Prima Pandora (Eve as the First Pandora): an explicit conflation of Eve and Pandora in a painting by a sixteenth-century French artist. (Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Courtesy Giraudon/Bridgeman Images.)
Until that time, humankind had lived unburdened by care and disease, all of which were kept in a covered jar. Pandora, curious to know what the jar contained, took its lid off and unleashed into the world all kinds of pain and suffering, along with the illnesses that haunt us night and day silently because Zeus deprived them of the use of their tongues. Horrified by what had happened, Pandora tried to put the lid back on, but our sufferings had all already escaped, leaving nothing but Hope at the bottom. So central is Pandora’s story to our conception of the contradictions implied in our impulse of curiosity that by the sixteenth century Joachim du Bellay was able to compare Pandora to Rome itself, the archetypal Eternal City, and all it stood for, everything that was good and everything that was evil.11
Curiosity and punishment for curiosity: the Christian typological readings of the stories of Eve and Pandora date from as early as the second century, in the writings of Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus. According to both authors, the godhead bestowed upon humankind the gift of wanting to know more and then the punishment for trying to do so. Leaving aside for a moment their misogynistic resolutions, both stories concern the question of the limits of ambition. A certain curiosity seems permissible, too much is punished. But why?
As we have noted, Dante’s Ulysses seems to have met his end as a punishment not for the fault of evil counsel but for going beyond what God has deemed a permissible curiosity. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden, Ulysses is offered the whole of the knowable world to explore: only past that horizon he must not venture. But precisely because the horizon is the world’s visible and material limit, just as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the limit of whatever can be perceived and therefore known, the forbidden horizon and the forbidden fruit implicitly admit that something else can be achieved beyond the commonplace. This is what Robert Louis Stevenson, in the nineteenth century, confronted daily in the Presbyterian Edinburgh of his youth, where the gray facades displayed one after another the Ten Commandments, in a perseverance of Thou Shalt Nots that Stevenson was later to call “the law of negatives”: that is to say, the pleasurable temptations offered, as in a dark mirror, even to those who have not yet conceived them.12
To Ulysses’ fateful curiosity, Dante counterpoises that of Jason, captain of the Argonauts, who set off with his companions to collect the Golden Fleece and returned home victorious with his booty. As Dante is approaching the end of his journey in Paradise, when he finally sees the ineffable form of the entire universe, he compares his astonished vision to that of the god Neptune seeing the shadow of Jason’s ship gliding by, the first human craft to sail the god’s desolate waters.13 This comparison grants Dante the blessing of a quest that has been allowed and is therefore meritorious, as opposed to the damned quest of the unfortunate Ulysses in search of the forbidden unknown.
Ulysses’ quest is physical, material, overly ambitious; the brave words that Tennyson puts in his mouth in his inspired translation of the passage—“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—are partly wishful thinking. Striving and seeking, as we know all too well, do not always lead to finding, and yielding, in certain cases, may not be offered as a choice. Dante’s quest is spiritual, metaphysical, humble. For both men, curiosity is the essential attribute of their human nature: it defines what it is to be human. But while for Ulysses this “to be” means “to be in space,” for Dante it means “to be in time” (a distinction that the Italian language conveys much more clearly than the English, with stare for being in a certain place and essere for existing). Three centuries later, Hamlet tries to solve the problem by blending both in his famous question.
As both Eve and Pandora knew, curiosity is the art of asking questions. What is the knowledge of good and evil? What is my role in the Garden? What lies inside the sealed jar? What am I allowed to know? What am I not allowed to know? And why? And by what or whom? To understand what we are asking, we disguise our curiosity as narratives that put the questions into words and open them to further questions. Literature is in this sense an ongoing dialogue that resembles the Talmudic form of argument known as pilpul, a dialectical method for reaching knowledge through ever keener questions (though it is sometimes used merely as a hair-splitting debating exercise). So essential is the art of questioning that in the eighteenth century Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav was able to say that a man who has no questions about God does not believe in God at all.14
In a very concrete sense, writing stories, collecting stories, setting up libraries of stories are activities that give roots to the nomadic impulse of curiosity: as mentioned earlier, the curiosity of a reader who seeks knowledge of “what happened” and the curiosity of a traveler are intimately intertwined. Ulysses’ quest leads him physically into a maelstrom that swirls his ship around three times and then closes the sea over the crew; Dante’s leads him poetically to the final point of coherence.
gathered with love in a single volume
the leaves that through the universe have been scattered.15
Dante’s vision, in spite (or because) of its immensity, prevents him from translating that volume into comprehensible words; he sees it but he cannot read it. Assembling books we mirror Dante’s gesture, but because no single human book can fully translate the universe, our quests resemble Ulysses’ quest, where the intention counts more than the result. Every one of our achievements opens up new doubts and tempts us with new quests, condemning us for ever to a state of inquiring and exhilarating unease. This is curiosity’s inherent paradox.
The late Renaissance materialized this paradox in what could be called “curiosity machines.” In printed texts, in charts, in intricate drawings, even in three-dimensional construction kits, these extraordinary mnemonic and didactic devices were designed to reward the questioner’s curiosity by means of a mechanical system of associations and information retrieval.
The Renaissance machines, tangible incarnations of our belief that the meaning of things lies within our reach, adopted a variety of ingenious forms. They were either intricate versions of our Excel charts, designed like family trees of many branches, or constructed as wheels that moved one inside the other to elicit couplings between the concepts written on their margins. Sometimes they were even conceived as pieces of furniture, such as the wonderful wheel of books designed by Agostino Ramelli in 1588, meant to stand next to the reader’s desk like a three-dimensional version of Windows.16
Each of these machines works differently. A labyrinthine machine such as that depicted in Orazio Toscanella’s Armonia di tutti i principali retori (Harmony of all Main Rhetoricians) was designed to help structure rhetorical arguments stemming from any given premise.17 The procedure is anything but simple. The initial idea is reduced to a single proposition, which is then divided into subject and predicate. Each of these can then be boxed into one of a number of categories inscribed on one of four wheels of Toscanella’s machine. The first wheel is dedicated to subjects, the second to predicates, the third to relationships, the fourth to questions such as who, why, and what. Every point of each wheel can be (or become) the starting place of a new quest, the beginning of an extraordinary web of connecting thoughts, considerations, musings, inquiries, and illuminations.
The four wheels of Orazio Toscanella’s memory machine, from his Armonia di tutti i principali retori (Venice, 1569). (B 6.24 Th.Seld., Sig. I2 recto, Sig. K2 recto, Sig. K3 recto, and Sig. K4 recto. Courtesy The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.)
These machines are too complex for a nonscholar such as myself to describe accurately; I am not at all sure that, even if I understood the rules better, I would be able to use one effectively. What is obvious, however, is that these machines were concrete representations of the methods of curiosity, and even when supposedly allowing their users to reach the desired conclusion, they continuously suggested different pathways for new explorations. If prehistoric language appeared to humans as aural hallucinations, these machines allowed for voluntary hallucinations, the conjuring up of things projected into the future or recalled from the past. Beyond their use as how-to manuals and cataloguing tools, these machines promised to help the user think. One of their inventors, Ludovico Castelvetro, defined his art as “the science of asking why.”18
Machines such as Toscanella’s are a material representation of Dante’s and Ulysses’ quests and illustrate the different paths followed by the two travelers, allowing those who learned to use them to follow question after question, from thought to seemingly unconnected thought, privileging the impulse of curiosity over the conscious need to ask. Dante himself, on the beach of Mount Purgatory, compares this impulse to “people who reflect on the path to take / who set forth with the heart, and with the body stand still.”19 Carlo Ossola, in his illuminating reading of the Commedia, notes that to Ulysses’ curiositas Dante opposes his own necessitas to act.20 Ulysses’ curiosity is the shadow of Dante’s and leads to his tragic death; Dante’s necessary quest ends as all comedies end—that is to say, with a happy and successful achievement. But it is an achievement that, as Dante repeatedly tells us, cannot be told in human language.
Much of the otherworldly voyage, many of the terrors and the marvels, even Dante’s own wavering undertakings, are expressed in the clearest possible verse, but the actual final vision is ineffable, beyond the scope of human art, partly because he is describing his movement towards the Aristotelian primordial good, and “each thing that moves is in some respect lacking and does not possess its whole being at one time,” as Dante noted in one of his epistles. This is the “other path” already mentioned that Virgil recommends when he first addresses Dante, whose first-chosen road is blocked by the three wild beasts at the edge of the dark forest, the “fated path” that Virgil orders Minos not to hinder when the two travelers reach the edge of the second circle of Hell. This is also the “other way” announced to the three Magi in Matthew 2:12 in the dream that leads them away from Herod and towards the birth of their Saviour.21
The Stoics saw Ulysses’ curiosity as exemplary. Seneca, in the early years of the first century C.E., praised the figure of Ulysses for teaching us “how to love fatherland, wife, father, how to navigate to those honourable things even in the midst of storms,” but declared himself uninterested in the details of his wanderings, “whether Ulysses was tossed about between Italy and Sicily or beyond the known world.” Earlier, Heraclitus, for whom Ulysses’ long journey is nothing more than “a vast allegory,” argued that Ulysses’ “wise decision” to descend into Hades proved that his curiosity “would not leave any place unexplored, not even the depths of Hell.” Several decades later, Dio Chrysostom praised Ulysses (pairing him with the sophist Hippias) for being just what a philosopher must be, “exceptional in everything under any circumstances.” Dio’s contemporary, Epictetus, compared Ulysses to a traveler who does not allow himself to be distracted by the beautiful inns he may find on his way; confronted with the Sirens’ song, he leaves his ears unplugged so as to hear them, but at the same time sails on, to pursue his quest successfully. This is Epictetus’s advice to all curious travelers.22
For Dante, Ulysses’ enterprise ends not in success but in disaster. Ulysses’ voyage is a tragedy. If by success we mean the full achievement of our endeavors, then failure is an integral part of Ulysses’ attempt, as it is an integral part of Dante’s all-apprehending poetic project, in that his final vision cannot be put into words. Such failures are, in fact, an integral part of every artistic and scientific enterprise. Art advances through defeat, and science learns mostly from mistakes. What we don’t achieve maps our ambitions as much as what we do, and the Tower of Babel stands unfinished, less as a memorial of our shortcomings than as a monument to our exultant chutzpah.
As Dante certainly knew, no human quest is exclusively one or the other, none of our endeavors follows exclusively the adventures of Ulysses or those of Dante. Every investigation, every inquiry, every exploration is choked with an undergrowth of questions—moral, ethical, practical, whimsical— through which we advance and from which we cannot disentangle ourselves. Some progress, of course, is made but always accompanied by swarms of doubts and irresolution, when not by a feeling of guilt and transgression that results in the designation of a scapegoat: Eve and Pandora, the village witch and the heretical thinker, the inquisitive Jew and the nonconformist homosexual, the alienating outsider and the unorthodox explorer. Imaginative researchers in biology and chemistry, brave scholars in unofficial histories, illuminating critics of art and literature, revolutionary writers and composers and visual artists, lucid scientists in every field, even as they seek a truth comparable to the one Dante sought, face again and again the dangers that awaited Ulysses on his final journey. This is how our thinking evolves: trying to see at each turn not only the possible answers to our questions—in other words, the questions that will be conjured up next in our quest—but also the aleatory, sometimes tragic consequences of treading unexplored landscapes.
The question of how to find cures for deadly illnesses elicits the question of how to feed an ever-increasing and aging population; the question of how to develop and protect an egalitarian society elicits the question of how to prevent demagogy and the seduction of fascism; the question of how to create jobs to develop the economy elicits the question of how the creation of these jobs might tempt us to turn a blind eye on human rights and how it might affect the natural world around us; the question of how to develop technologies that allow us to hoard more and more information elicits the question of how to access, refine, and keep from abusing such information; the question of how to explore the unknown universe elicits the uneasy question of whether our human senses are capable of apprehending whatever it is we might discover on earth or in outer space.
Seven centuries after Dante’s encounter with Ulysses, on 26 November 2011, an exploring device the size of a small car was launched from Cape Canaveral at 10:02 in the morning. After traveling over 350 million miles, it reached the planet Mars on 6 August 2012 and landed on the desolate plain of Aeolis Palus. The name of the exploratory craft was Curiosity, the desire for knowledge that Dante called “ardore” and that drove Ulysses to undertake his one last fatal journey.
The Martian plain chosen as the landing site of Curiosity bore the name of the king of the winds, Aeolus, in whose realm Ulysses stopped on his own travels. In the tenth book of the Odyssey, Homer tells us, after escaping from the hunger of the Cyclops, Ulysses, who called himself Nobody, which also means Everybody, reaches Aeolus’s island. Here he is feasted by the king for a full month and, upon leaving, he is given a sack of oxhide in which Aeolus has bound the winds up tightly with a silver cord, allowing only Zephyr, the West Wind, to help Ulysses on his way. Zephyr, in late medieval iconography, represents the sanguine man: that is to say, the optimist, the constant searcher, someone like Ulysses himself.23
After nine days’ travel, the crew begins to imagine that Aeolus’s sack contains a treasure which Ulysses intends to keep for himself. They loosen the cord, and, in a dreadful gust, all the imprisoned winds escape, provoking a terrible storm that drives the ship back to Aeolus’s island. Offended by their carelessness, the king of the winds banishes Ulysses and the crew from his realm and sends them off to sea without the smallest breeze. In the story of the beginning of a new chapter of Ulysses’ journey, not a woman but a crew of curious men are to blame for the disaster.
If one cared to construct a typology between the curiosity of Ulysses’ companions and the Curiosity vessel that landed on Mars, one could create a little cautionary tale about the dangers of discovery. But more interesting, more instructive, more rewarding perhaps, is to read the episode in the context of Homer’s entire poem and Dante’s illuminating sequel. In that case, the unleashing of the winds is a circumstantial disaster that takes place in mid-adventure, cautionary only in the sense that the outcome of our quests is not entirely dependent on our own actions. Rather than demeaning Ulysses’ performance, the episode adds strength to his determination, his thirst for knowing more, his ardore. And if in the end (as Homer has it) Odysseus reaches Ithaca and defeats the suitors and tells Penelope his version of the story, or whether (as Dante imagines) he refuses to bring the story to an end and continues his search until he can seek no more, what matters is that Ulysses never gives up his questioning. Dante, who is ultimately given an answer too vast to comprehend except as an impoverished memory, envies, we sense, Ulysses’ fatality, and though for the sake of the poem’s logic Dante must condemn him, he lends Ulysses words that, spoken from the hovering flames, seem to transcend his fate and survive his condemnation.
