Why Leave the House?
I've been working my way through The Lusiads, and haven't been overly impressed. But at the end of the fourth canto, I came across a pages long rebuke of all of the adventuring that had been breathlessly and triumphantly related to that point. It is delivered by a wise old man to Vasco da Gama as he embarks on his voyage, and begins:
Oh, the folly of it, this craving for power, this thirsting after the vanity we call fame, this fraudulent pleasure known as honour that thrives on popular esteem!
And ends:
But now there is no undertaking so daring, or so accursed, be it through fire, water, heat, cold or the sword, that man will leave it untried. Wretched in truth is his lot, and strange his nature!
This reminds me of Ulysses's admission of the adventuring spirit that landed him in Dante's Inferno:
Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope,
Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind
I experienced the futility of this spirit on my own venture forth from wife and home. During that trip, without planning to, I risked the depths of my psyche rather than fire, water (well, it was rainy), heat, cold, or the sword. Remembering the pain of that separation from my wife, I caught my breath reading the lament of the wife of one of da Gama's crew members at his departure:
Husband mine, so sweet and dear to me, without whom love has willed that I should find life unbearable, what makes you go risking on the angry waves a life that belongs not to you, but to me?
8:39:56 AM 
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