Flying by that sign some years ago, I remembered that Trizina was the birthplace of Theseus, legendary hero, killer of the Minotaur, once a king in Athens. From a distance, there was nothing to see except some farms and chicken coops. How could the former home of a mythic hero appear this modest? I made a U-turn and drove back, turned onto that country road, and went to take a closer look at the place.

You may recall that Theseus was also the husband of Phaedra, stepmother to his grown son Hippolytus from an earlier marriage. Theseus traveled a lot. Often alone, his young wife Phaedra took a fancy to her stepson. They were close to the same age. The son probably looked like his father. The latter was absent, the former present. In Phaedra’s mind, one thing led to another.

Hippolytus, however, was a devotee of Artemis. He not only had no interest in his stepmother, but he did not care for women in general. He thought the world would be a better place without them. In his play Hippolytus, Euripides has him saying that women are a curse and that in a better world men would have children by buying seeds in a temple, presumably to plant in special gardens in which children would grow from them.

His stepmother’s passion for him therefore made for a situation that was doubly awkward. He vehemently rejected her after an attendant betrayed her secret to him. Phaedra responded by hanging herself. She left a suicide note that falsely accused Hippolytus of coming into her bed in Theseus’ absence and forcing himself upon her. Finding the note, an outraged Theseus banned his son from the city. As Hippolytus fled Trizina in a horse drawn chariot, a bull emerged from the waters of the Saronic Gulf and attacked his horses. The horses went wild. Entangled in the reins, Hippolytus was thrown from the chariot and smashed his head on a rock. He died almost immediately. The story, with additional details, including the role that Aphrodite, goddess of love, played in the whole affair, is told in Euripides’ play.

Footnote about that bull: Phaedra was the daughter of Queen Pasiphae, wife of King Minos of Crete. The Minotaur Theseus slew was her son. Pasiphae apparently conceived a passion for a particularly attractive white bull, a present to her husband from Poseidon, god of the sea. The animal returned her affections. With some engineering help from Daedalus, the two consummated the affair. The result, the Minotaur – half-human, half-bull – was Phaedra’s half-brother. She was married to his killer. It seems that, unhappy about what became of his gift’s offspring, Poseidon came up with another bull who killed Theseus’ offspring.

Trizina looked no better from close up than from afar – just a small village in the foothills. I did, however come upon a fenced off meadow identified by a sign as an archeological site. At one time it had apparently been the location of two large structures the limestone foundations of which were still visible. One had been an Asclepeion – a sort of medical resort or spa.The remains of the watercourses in the foundations indicated that it had featured healing baths. The original purpose of the other was less clear. A plaque suggested that it may once have been a temple to Hippolytus. According to other opinions, it had been a temple to Aphrodite Katascopia – “Peeping Aphrodite.” It supposedly marked the spot from where a lovesick Phaedra had secretly watched a naked Hippolytus performing his morning kalesthenics.

Walking in that meadow with its blood-red poppies, its yellow and violet wildflowers, the air filled with the buzzing of bees, I wondered why anyone would erect a temple to Hippolytus. To be sure, he had commendably declined to take physical advantage of Phaedra’s passion for him. But I found it amazing that this act of self-control would have been thought to warrant commemoration on this scale. Were the errant passions of stepmothers in those days so widespread that the ancient Greeks found it advisable to reinforce resistance to them with public monuments?

The thought would have been somewhat more plausible had that exercise in self-control by Hippolytus been a difficult feat for him. But he did not like women in the first place. He would have been only slightly less horrified by the prospect of sex with any woman than he was with Phaedra. So, self-control was not exactly the right word for his behavior. Militant indifference to women was. Seen from that point of view, a temple to Hippolytus became a disturbing monument to an entire culture’s feelings of unease about the sexuality of women.

A temple to Aphrodite Katascopia struck me as equally troubling. In this context, it would have reminded men that women are dangerous and that, rather unfortunately, there is no averting that danger by avoiding interaction with them. Aphrodite is always out there scheming; as she did Hippolytus, she’ll get you eventually no matter what you do.

Upon reflection, my reactions struck me as simple-minded. A man who has no erotic interest in women was one thing; perhaps he preferred other men. A man obsessed with women as a problem – as Hippolytus apparently was – was another. Chances were, he liked them too much. He did not hate women; he hated his susceptibility and vulnerability to their charms. That was why he was constantly out there hunting, wearing himself out, taking cold showers, as it were. He spent the rest of his time praying to Artemis. Just to keep his thoughts on safe tracks, he venerated her whose sexuality was not interesting and who, in any case, was not likely ever to be available. Differently put, his apparent abhorrence of women was his form of self-control. He had much to control.

It then struck me that modern men did not generally behave like that. Their patron goddesses were women like Marilyn Monroe, walking anatomy lessons, small-waisted busty creatures in high heels, which heels emphasize the spindle of the leg and bring the hips to visual life. How did modern men cope with this constant surfeit of sexual provocation? Where did the cold showers fit in?

They didn’t really. Modern men did not care about self-control. They had discovered another solution to Hippolytus’ problem. For the desexualizing of women – as in Artemis – they substituted the depersonalization of sex. They had sex with women’s bodies, not with their owners. Sex – a temporary thrill – posed no threat to their self-possession. Love did, with all its headaches, heartbreak, loss of perspective, and emotional storms.

Which suggested to me that there was a time when the distinction between love and sex, and between persons and their bodies, did not come so easily. Otherwise, why would Hippolytus not have availed himself of it?

So, perhaps a temple to Hippolytus did make some sense, as would one to Aphrodite’s possession of Phaedra. As both characters tragically discovered, love,  inseparable from desire and sex, is an immense, uncontrollable power, one to be seriously wary of, and one of which you cannot get the better by ignoring it. An occasional pilgrimage to Trizina might have reminded people of that while they enjoyed the healing baths.

The moralists will say that Phaedra should have kept her eyes to herself, and Hippolytus, well, he should have found himself a wife. For moralists, nothing is ever truly complicated. But Aphrodite has their number too. If you don’t believe me, you may enjoy the film The Blue Angel (1930).

Meanwhile, say a prayer for Pasiphae, too. She only did what she had to do. (Thank you, Willie Nelson.)

It was getting late. I had to get back on the road and head for Corinth.

I don’t know enough about the U.S. tax code to have an opinion on this issue. To tell the truth, I am not particularly interested in it either. Much more interesting to me is the fact, emerging from these interviews, that a thirty-year old, Harvard-educated, young man with four billion dollars does not seem to know what to do with himself. He’ll enjoy his new wealth, of course. Beyond that, however, he says he does not know what he will do. He has a software business of his own, but his commitment to it sounds half-hearted.

For a start, he could set a good example and give three of his four billion to a decent organization like Doctors Without Borders. That would leave him with one billion, enough for most people to get their act together. Then, given his skills and the way he came by all that money, he might exercise himself constructively about the fact that Facebook, “people’s home on the web,” exists largely for people — like him – who don’t seem to know what to do with themselves. Its world-wide success as an online community speaks loudly of the absence of actual community, as does the general vacuousness of Facebook content. As one of my daughters puts it, “the good thing about Facebook is that you can keep in touch with your friends without having to talk to them.”

“In touch about what?” I asked her. “Well, you know, this and that, what they’re doing, good movies, who their new boyfriends are, for example,” she said.

It sounded to me like life on the excitement plan, but without the excitement. When I told her that, she said, “You don’t understand, Dad, not everything needs to be deeply meaningful.” To which the answer is, “Right, but some things had better be!”

So, how about an online community, especially for the young, that instead of being consumed with trivialities, encourages some focus on what actually matters? It probably would not bring in much advertising revenue, since people who take the world, and their place in it, seriously are not likely to think of themselves primarily as consumers. But who needs advertising revenue when you have a billion dollars?

It would be a huge challenge to refocus the attention of the young from fascination with magazine covers that promise “Eleven fool-proof sex tricks to drive your partner wild” to questions like, “What are we actually going to do about the growing numbers of the poor?” But what’s a Harvard education for if not to prepare able people to meet worthwhile challenges?

Mr. Saverin has not asked me for advice. But here it is all the same, for free.

“What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about your saying that it is time for men to take their feelings seriously,” she replied. “Didn’t you say that? Now that women have finally gotten on with it and take their minds seriously, men should do the same thing, except with their emotions. It made me think of a whole new set of rights that men will now claim, like the right to burst into tears when they feel like it.”

“You know that’s not what I meant!”

“I am not sure that I do,” she said. “One moment you are talking about some women playing a shamanistic role in neolithic society. The next moment you are suggesting that what fits women, rather than men, for that role is their greater emotionality. And because you have this idea that emotion is a form of cognition that picks up dimensions of reality not otherwise accessible, you think it would great if men tried their hands at it.”

“And you don’t agree?”

“I don’t know what to agree with! The reasoning looks shaky. But apart from that, I have not noticed women in general being any more receptive to special dimensions of reality than men, at least not in the constructive way you seem to be envisaging. Whether or not some of them were shamans during the Stone Age, you would have to look awfully hard to find a shaman among them today. And even if one gives you that there is something to be sensed out there, women generally seem to me just as clueless about it as men are generally. I have not found women to be, for example, more receptive to art than men. They may be more emotional, but that emotionality does not translate into more sensitive cognition. At least not that I have noticed.”

“I take it that you have no faith in what some people call women’s intuition?”

“You are taking it right. When it comes to intuition and insight, there are extraordinary women just as there are extraordinary men. Their being extraordinary in that regard has nothing to do with their gender. More importantly, women’s intuition, even if there is such a thing, is not the same thing as their emotionality.”

“What is it then?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “As I just said, I doubt that the thing exists in the first place as an endowment peculiar to women.”

“Let’s forget the gender stuff,” I said. “As I recall, I argued myself that allocating mental endowments along gender lines may be absurd. What we are talking about is a receptivity to the presence of what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call the uncanny. It shows up in our response to sublime art, for instance. That receptivity is not intellectual or rational. It is not simply emotional either. It seems to be a mixture of both. Agreed?”

“That depends on where you are going with it,” she replied.

“It shouldn’t,” I said. “It is either so or it isn’t.”

“Okay, let’ suppose it’s so. Then what?”

“Then I want to argue that distrust of emotion is a cognitive handicap. It precludes full awareness of reality.”

“Only if reality includes the uncanny,” she said.

“Doesn’t reality include sublime art?” I asked.

“Sure,” she replied, “but the question is whether it also includes what sublime art purports to represent. Not being receptive to sublime art is a sad but trivial handicap unless what sublime art captures is an important part of the inventory of real reality.”

“I think it is.”

“Of course you do! But you have not shown it to be so.”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘shown’,” I said. “If you mean that I have not produced a rational argument to that effect, you are right. No such argument is possible. But if you mean that I have done nothing to support or encourage the belief that there are aspects of reality that, though they elude rational grasp, are nonetheless real, I am not sure that that is true. Though they often leave much to be desired, these little essays I write are attempts at poetry, at art, if you will, which in this context is a kind of showing – probably the only kind that is possible. Whether they are effective art is another question.”

“No such argument is possible?”

“Can you imagine one?” I asked. “Can you imagine an argument about this such that the person who hears and understands it is thereby done out of the option of not believing the conclusion? That not believing the conclusion may be irrational does not prevent anyone from not believing it or from ignoring it.”

“That is not what ‘shown’ usually means,” she replied. “Moreover, people can ignore art, too.”

“But not if it gets to them,” I said. “Art is somewhat like religion in that nothing really convinces anyone that God exists except running into Him one day.”

“Good grief!” she sighed. “You are hopeless. God!? And this from someone who believes that the world will be saved by a revival of Greek paganism – rightly understood, of course!”

It was thought that Apollo spoke through the Sybil. Apparently the oracle originated with Apollo’s slaying of a python who was a child of mother Earth (of which Delphi was considered the center). He threw the dead snake into a crack in the rock, whence it fell into an underground pool of water, where it started to decay. Being a divine python – a chthonic deity, the process took a very long time. The emanations from the crack in the rock were thought to be the products of that decomposition. They were what the Sybil inhaled, which is why she was also called the Pythia – the python-woman.

So how get from there to the voice of Apollo? Take your pick. Either Apollo spoke in the emanations of defeated, subjugated femininity because that is what he basically was: the triumph of the Olympian male over the chthonic female. Or, more radically, at the base of all rational sense-making, which is what Apollo stood for, lies something else equally miraculous, namely the irrational and inchoate. Apollo is merely the comprehensible face of that otherwise incomprehensible power. How you go here depends more on your predilections than on any evidence anyone has, or is likely to, come up with.

It seems to me an interesting fact that the job of hearing Apollo’s voice invariably fell to women. Apparently, the priest’s of Apollo regularly descended into the valleys below Delphi to scour the countryside for suitable candidates. The Pythia’s job was inherently dangerous to her health. If she took too deep a breath of volcanic gas, she died. The Sybil had to be regularly replaced, either because she died by accident or of old age, or because the hazards of the job gradually took their toll. She was always replaced by another woman. Why? Why did the priests of Apollo not take it upon themselves to listen for Apollo’s voice? And whence the idea that, though women are better equipped to hear the god’s voice, it takes men to interpret and understand it?

Some evidence suggests the existence of a tradition, reaching back into the Stone Age, of women playing a shamanistic role in society because they were better at it than men. European neolithic potters, for example, were generally women. Interesting neolithic pottery, crafted for ritual – as opposed to practical – purposes, was, again, made by women, not under the direction of men, but presumably because women were more in touch than men with the realities touched upon or celebrated in those rituals.

At the risk of getting onto terrain where angels fear to tread, let’s ask how women differ from men. The preferred answer to that question these days is that the difference comes down to plumbing. I suspect that in the old days the answer was that women have better intuitions about some things and men about other things; that women are more emotional, hence more susceptible to realities that only emotion can pick up; and men, somewhat challenged in that regard, but possibly better than women in putting an Apollonian face on those realities.

But I do not think it necessary to engage in the possibly absurd exercise of allocating mental endowments along gender lines. Nothing stops men from listening to their emotions or from respecting them. And nothing stops women from taking their minds seriously. While recent developments in society have encouraged women to do that, nothing has encouraged men to grow more respectful of their emotions.

What seems to me ultimately at stake here is the development of a different kind of human being, one that both thinks and feels, and foregoes the temptation systematically to privilege one at the expense of the other. And when I think about this in the context of places like Delphi, the consequences strike me as being anything but trivial. They would include a different sense of reality.

In other words, the point is not that it would be nice if men learned to respect their feelings more and discovered that they have a heart, or nice if fewer women confused having a head with being like men and heartless like men. It is that there is more to reality than Apollo can reveal, and that Apollo himself, in his very nature, would be quick to concede that.

I suspect that is what Delphi ultimately stood for and why it lasted so long. Otherwise it would have had to be a thousand years of tomfoolery and charlatanism.

I found the museum rather impressive, though not as a source of information about whales. To be sure, I learned that whales can reach lengths of over a hundred feet and may weigh as much as two hundred thousand pounds. I saw four enormous whale skeletons, nicely mounted. (Looking at their size, I found myself hoping that when my elfin daughter speaks of being a marine mammal veterinarian, she envisages harbor seals, rather than whales, as her patients.)

But the main theme of the museum’s displays was whaling, not whales: whale boats, harpoons, kettles for rendering blubber, even a ½ scale model of a huge whaling ship. It seems that people spent as long a four years on these things sailing the world’s oceans hunting whales. Apparently, that is how long it took to fill all the barrels in the ship’s hold with boiled down whale product.

At first, of course, one is stunned by all this human ingenuity and resiliency. The hardships those whalers put themselves through seem almost unimaginable. Impossibly tight quarters, poor food, cold, stormy seas, dangerous hunting, all for very little pay, and sometimes none. It was apparently not uncommon for the lowliest sailors – as a result of trivial purchases in the ship’s store – to come off these voyages owing more to the whaling company than it owed them.

Then, at least if you are me, you start wondering why people did this at all. Why did humans start hunting whales? The latter were not food, at least not for New Bedford type people. The market for whale oil and ambergris had to develop. It is not as though whale hunting started as a way of making a living. The hunting came first. Historically speaking, the living one could make by means of it was an institutional afterthought.

Why set out to kill these magnificent animals that posed no threat to humans, were not a source of food, or of hides, or of anything else of use until much later

I don’t know about you, but the only answer I can come up with is Artemis. They did it initially for the sheer joy of killing. I don’t hold that against them. It just strikes me as one of those discomfiting truths worth the occasional bit of reflection, as opposed to being treated as a purely accidental dimension of an otherwise laudable enterprise.

The truth would be somewhat less discomfiting if the exercise of this human predilection for destruction were limited to marine mammals or other non-human game. But as those lowly, exploited sailors discovered, it is not all that much fun to find oneself at the receiving end of that predilection. Again, I don’t hold that exploitation against the whaling companies, but it seems to me especially worth thinking about in light of where we are today, when all manner of hurtful and destructive behavior is wont to drape itself in the flag of freedom. That self-presentation is not exactly dishonest, but it is not entirely honest either. While unflinching honesty about such things can be overrated, in this instance just knowing that we are flinching might do us some good.

We did enjoy a delicious vegetarian lunch at a nearby restaurant. It should have been called “Diana’s Place” or “Chez Artemis”. Instead, it was called “No Problemo” and served great Mexican food. I recommend it. Take cash. They’re into pure basics and don’t accept credit cards. But there is a bank with an ATM across the street. No problemo.

I find all this amazing because, in America at least, the defects of capitalism have generally been a taboo subject. Talking as though one was not a happily unquestioning believer brought the risk of being tarred a socialist or a communist.

At the same time, the remedies offered in all these recent discussions tend to disappoint. They range from tougher government regulations to better education. By its very nature, one argument goes, capitalism thrives on self-seeking and greed. The only way of protecting ourselves from the consequences is a government that energetically stands up for the civic dimensions of society. That we have reached the point where government, when itself not largely for sale, happens to be chronically paralyzed, is left as a problem for another day.

Better education sounds great until one reflects on the fact that the unemployed and unemployable include many well-educated people. Educating them still better then sounds like an absurd proposal. So does providing more education to those who theoretically do not have enough – and this quite apart from the issue that the sort of education it takes to be employable lies increasingly beyond the reach of the natural abilities of the people who need it.

To be fair, one occasionally comes across more ambitious proposals. They tinker in one way or another with the institution of private property. The economist Paul Krugman, for instance, recommends raising taxes, especially on the well-to-do. Increased public revenue would enable government investment in, say, infrastructure improvement projects. This, in turn, would create jobs.

In effect, this replicates the New Deal approach. Krugman acknowledges, however, that the government investments necessary to pull the country out of the Great Depression came with World War II. He appears to think that that fact does not matter: government investment is government investment. But it most certainly mattered politically. Finding itself at war galvanized the nation. It created the political will required to enable that investment.

That political will is conspicuously absent today. To be sure, as dispossession increases, and as the numbers of the dispossessed continue rising, they will become the political majority, if they are not that already. That majority will eventually impose its will on the have’s, who will not be happy. They will feel oppressed and will mobilize their resources.

We are seeing some of that already. The insanely vitriolic attacks on Obama, who is a harmless moderate Democrat, strike me as a pre-emptive political war by the have’s on the have-not’s. The former see the hand-writing on the wall, but they are not about to lie down waiting for the realities to land on their heads.

While we shall undoubtedly see more of that, it will not avert the natural political developments ahead. But it hardly makes for a healthy or stable society when its most resourceful members see their interests systematically trampled upon.

Alternatives look thin on the ground. As a matter of fact, I don’t see any at all short of thinking differently about a lot of things. As a short-term economic solution, the dictatorship of the majority looks a little better than its continuing impoverishment. The latter can only lead to violent upheavals. But the price of that solution may be the demise of decent democracy and, in all likelihood, an even worse future.

A better long-term solution would be different thinking, especially among the have’s. Ideally, they would find their way to giving, not because they have to, but because they want to.

The story is all over the front pages of the newspapers. It astounds commentators, the more so as J.P.Morgan-Chase has been at the forefront of lobbying efforts to prevent government regulations limiting this kind of risk-taking. But viewed from a broader perspective, the story is hardly new. And it has little to do with banking.

Humans do stupid things that make good material for stories. We tell and retell the stories. And then go on to redo the same, or similar, stupid things. Why is that? The phenomenon seems pretty strange, after all.

As a truth, it is almost boring that we pay no heed to the lessons or the wisdom of the past. So why bother telling stories no one listens to? Why bother describing and analyzing past disasters, or theorizing about them, when the results make no difference?

It looks as though there is a kink in our wiring. We make mistakes, work at understanding the causes and the reasons, perhaps even succeed at understanding them, tell the story for the benefit of the future, and then we ignore its practical implications. We go on and repeat the same, or similar, mistakes. One is tempted to infer from this constantly repeated scenario that while we may think we understand, we actually don’t. Perhaps all this achieved self-understanding is an illusion. Unsurprisingly, it has no effects.

Human myself, I too have great faith in the power of understanding. Looking at this general situation, I am inclined to suspect that there is something that we do not understand in all this analyzing, theorizing, and story-telling. It is that the truths we come up with in these contexts are of a sort that we do not want to know — perhaps even of a sort that we cannot afford fully to know. Otherwise, none of it makes any sense: three millennia (at least) of story-telling and no effects, especially none where it matters most. Of how many wars, for instance, do we have to understand the causes and the reasons before enough of our insights sink in to make war obsolete?

And, again, human myself, I too have the notion that if I go on to spell out this putative contribution to our common understanding of ourselves, it will make a difference.

I tell myself that it may make some difference. There is no kink in our wiring. The apparent kink is a limitation built into our capacity to understand ourselves. We do not lend ourselves to being understood in the same way other things do.

The main reason why we are closer in science to understanding the origins of the universe than we are to understanding ourselves is that, although we are part of it, we are much harder to understand than the universe. Yet we are not ostensibly or in principle more complex than it. But when we seek to understand ourselves, we run into obstacles that are absent in the case of the universe. The latter does not resist understanding; we do – at least when we approach ourselves in hopes of achieving the same sort of clarity that science enables in the case of the universe. Something about us eludes our rational grasp. It is that we don’t want to understand and, in some respects, cannot afford to. On pain of ceasing to function, we cannot afford to be fully transparent to our own eyes.

We are wired to know that. That wiring manifests itself in our aversion to surfeits of self-consciousness and, more broadly, in our shying away from the full meaning of stories that, if taken in, would bring disabling surfeits of self-consciousness in their train.

But we are also wired to try to understand obstacles to our well-being, even when we ourselves are those obstacles. Shying away from the truth, to the point of pretending that it does not exist, is a poor recipe for survival. So we keep telling those stories. They are our way of negotiating the apparent dilemma in which we find ourselves. We cannot afford to fully understand ourselves, yet, despite the risks of trying, we had better understand as much as we can.

When it comes to understanding ourselves, the best we can do is poetry and receptivity to it. And there will never come a day in this context when science – or philosophy, for that matter – finally trumps poetry.

“Fine,” you may say. “Suppose I grant you that poetry is, at least potentially, a form of understanding. Why has it been so catastrophically ineffective?”

An appropriately modest answer to that question would be, “I wish I knew.” Except that I think I do know.

Like great art, good poetry is exceedingly hard to bring off. When, for fear of upsetting people, poetry aims too low – as in the Greek version of Acteon’s story, it comes across as childish. And when it aims too high – as in my retelling of that story, it either puts people off or it becomes incomprehensible. Moreover, the bull’s eye is a constantly moving target. Times shape how poetry is heard, whether it has an audience at all, and how perceptive that audience is willing to be, or capable of being. The same is true of him or her who holds the bow and arrow. The poet loosens that arrow as from atop a wild horse in motion. After all, he or she is also only human, buffeted by winds on all sides, and in perpetually tenuous possession of the truth. A person half-blind himself, or herself, tries to hit a moving target in the semi-darkness.

Were it not for the fact that poetry thus conceived is an exhilarating endeavor, the enterprise would be hopeless. But like sublime art, it only takes one good hit to make a huge difference in the world. Apparently, notwithstanding the poor odds, it can be done. Humans being what they are, I am sure it eventually will be.

The same cannot be said for the wild turkey I watched from my studio window this morning. It was raining. He had come up onto our back patio and found an earthworm between the flagstones. He shook it in his beak until the worm was thrown off a few feet away. Then he walked over to it, picked it up with lightning speed, and repeated the procedure. This went on and on. It looked like every time he took another small bite out of the worm.

Wild turkeys need to eat too, but I would rather not see them do it. It’s enough to turn one into a vegetarian. But I see nothing to be gained in this context from focusing on the fact that humans also kill and eat other animals, including, occasionally, turkeys bred for the purpose. What interests me more at the moment is that they’re usually somewhat squeamish about it. At least during a meal, insisting on calling people’s attention to this fact invites their disapproval. It is bad manners.

But so, of course, is chewing with an open mouth, even when what you’re eating is a vegetarian dinner. No one wants to be vividly reminded of the career of food once it passes the lips on its way into our digestive tract.

We are squeamish about a lot of things that are real. If that does not look invariably maladaptive, it is because manifestations of that squeamishness often depend on contexts. A dinner table is not an apt venue for discussions about ourselves as meat-eaters or about the graphic details of digestion. That does not keep anyone interested in those realities from intimate knowledge of them from, say, a scientific point of view.

But there is also squeamishness that seems to exist independently of contexts, or to persist through all contexts. We are not constantly at the dinner table. But we are constantly living our lives. If, in that all-encompassing context, there are things about us that we would rather not know, or not focus on, then there is never a time when bringing them up will not be viewed as bad manners.

The teller of some stories about humans, namely stories aimed at revealing uncomfortable truths about us, constantly runs the risk of being perceived as ill-mannered. He brings his audience’s disapproval down upon his head and, along with it, a measure of unwillingness to listen. What with the truth being complicated to start with, that makes it somewhat unlikely that he will be understood at all.

I say that not to invite attention to the fact that telling such stories can be a tough row to hoe or to present the teller of them as a tragic hero. Much more interesting to my mind is the apparent fact that some truths about us that we would be better off knowing than ignoring are among those least welcome in our minds and in our conversations.

I suggested in an earlier post that there is only so much transparency about ourselves that we can afford. If we were aware of the tricks to which our intelligence has recourse in the process of keeping us afloat, those tricks would become ineffective. We would sink and drown, brought to grief, so to speak, by our own cleverness. Understandably enough, therefore, we instinctively shy away from the risk of knowing more than is good for us.

But the reverse risk is not knowing enough. In our self-defensive enthusiasm, we may rush into the embrace of a self-ignorance that could end up being as much a threat to our well-being as knowing too much. Hence, speaking of tricks, the one called for is finding that distance from the sun where we are not so close to it that it burns us and not so far away that we freeze to death.

At the risk of sounding grandiose, one might rightly say that a way of understanding the long and often tragic story of human beings is to see it as an oscillation between those two extremes, punctuated rarely, if ever, by moments when we get it right.

Take that little story the old Greeks told about Acteon’s encounter with Artemis. Some misguided fellow aspires to a level of intimacy with a goddess to which, as a mere mortal, he is not entitled. She kills him by causing his hunting dogs to tear him apart. One may be put off by her brutality, but one thinks that one understands the story. Aspiring to intimacy with gods is a bad idea. Greek mythology is full of stories of people brought to grief by that aspiration.

In a world without gods, the story becomes meaningless. Even in one where gods are part of the inventory of reality, the story does not do much good for an audience whose members do not individually see themselves as at risk of seeking intimacy with divinities.

But try telling, or retelling, the story – as I tried to do the other day – so that it makes some sense, and you run the risk of serving up more meaning than your audience can comfortably stomach. Artemis becomes the poetic personification of the urge to kill and of the joys we derive from destruction. She is not “out there” as trees and mountains are. She is in, among other places, us. We enjoy killing and destroying.

Perhaps one responds to that by saying, well, some people apparently do. I am not one of them. To which the story replies, “That’s part of the truth, that we do not, and probably cannot, fully know it as applying to us! You cannot take Artemis to bed and you probably would not want to.” The truth is that all of us know at some level that we at least occasionally derive a strange thrill from destroying things, as when we enthusiastically hurt other people, for example. And the truth also is that most of us do not want to know that; it makes us uncomfortable. So we deny it. We write off personal experiences at odds with that denial as momentary aberrations. And we dismiss people conspicuously given to enjoying the pleasures of destruction as chronic aberrants, as persons crippled in their humanity. Or, perhaps like Acteon, we try to wrap our minds, or our arms, around the truth in efforts to embrace it. As he found out, that does not work either.

You are now telling a story that hits a little closer to home, but just because it does, you are likely to receive less warm a welcome with it. It is like talking about slaughterhouses at a dinner table where people have steak on their plates. There is one crucial difference, however. Slaughterhouses exist, just not for purposes of discussion at a dinner table. Do the joys of destruction exist? They do, and they don’t.

What sort of truth is this that one can neither honestly deny nor safely embrace? I suggest that it is the sort that one can sense but cannot understand. Try to make it more understandable, and people will reject it. Try to deny it, and they will think you a fool. Make it overly poetic –safe, so to speak, and it becomes meaningless.

I tried to take some the edge off the story by presenting the pleasures of destruction as the other face of the joys of making. They are two faces of the same thing and one needs to be a little wary of both. Making is not just unadulterated do-goodery, any more than enjoyed destruction is all aberration. Meanwhile, wariness is not the same thing as denial.

I do not know if my effort succeeded or, if instead, the messiness of the unspeakable truth has turned some of you into vegetarians. As it happens, that does not help either.

There is another heady story that I’ll try retelling one of these days. Hippolytus, also a devotee of Artemis, was a vegetarian of sorts. He was horrified by the very idea of physical interaction with actual women. He spent his days taking cold showers and wearing out his energies hunting. Next thing he knew, his stepmother had fallen passionately in love with him. By the end of the story, he was dead, his skull smashed against a rock. His friend Artemis did not lift a finger to save him from that fate.

As I understand this story,Tiresias did not literally go blind. He had been born blind; he just didn’t know it. But his awkward encounter with Athena caused him to know it. From that day on, he was a blind man who knew himself to be blind.

How can a blind man fail to know that he is blind? I am not sure. The story is a riddle. It goes on to assert that also from that day on, Tiresias could see better than other people. His new talent earned him a job as a professional seer.

In trying to sort out what happened to Tiresias, it may useful to start with the fact that, like Artemis, Athena is a virgin goddess. Her virginity is a non-accidental part of her persona. It seems that when it comes to these goddesses, intimate knowledge of them is out of the question. One may safely infer that attempts at such knowledge carry risks (as Acteon discovered). By contrast, Aphrodite, for example, is not averse to the occasional affair with a mortal. She has many. The human participants do not usually end up blind or dead, at least not as a matter of necessity.

Next, who is Athena? She is the poetic personification of the power of thought. Unlike Apollo, however, who, as god of form and therefore of intelligibility, represents thought in general, Athena specializes in practical thought. Her province is thought engaged in with a view to action, thought that answers questions like “What should I do?” and “How should I go about it?” Athena is, if you will, the goddess of practical good sense. The cool, clear eyes that Homer attributes to her speak of the power to see straight when action is called for.

So why would it be risky to come upon Athena naked? It would because practical thought cannot afford a lot of self-consciousness about itself. Setting out on its track has a double effect. On the one hand, it inhibits or paralyzes action. On the other, however, it eventually brings one face to face with the reality that action is all one is. Thought, too, is action.

When I reflect about the things that I do and why I do them, I am thrown back on my thoughts. I do what I do because I think this or I think that. I think I want this or that. Fine, so why do I think this? Because I think this other thing, and so on. While I am engaged in all this thinking, my doing appears inhibited. Yet even as I navigate through that mental landscape, practical thought is at the wheel at every moment getting me through it. I ought to go this way, or I ought to go that way. And then I go, spontaneously, or I don’t, and just as spontaneously go some other way, always with a view to getting somewhere. My spontaneity is always at it. It continuously flows or springs up as though out of nowhere. I am it. But it can seem that there is a disconcerting lack of rhyme or reason to all this activity.

In reality, I am simply running into the fact that there is not yet another consciousness behind my consciousness, or still another behind that one, that guides all those proceedings. They just happen. Meeting up with that fact, not as theory, but as experienced reality in oneself, makes for an encounter with Athena naked. I would not describe that encounter as jolly. Yes, one marvels at the miracle that despite the fact that no conscious being seems to be in charge, things work, and probably work better than they would were a conscious being in charge of them. At the same time, however, it can be somewhat scary to feel oneself in the hands, and so to speak at the mercy, of apparently non-conscious, non-human forces. Thought suddenly feels thoughtless. The illusion of control vanishes.

An encounter with Athena naked is not a contest that one can win. There is no wresting control from her. To try is to bring oneself to grief both mentally and emotionally. All that one can ultimately do is to let oneself be. And even that is not something that one can deliberately do. It just happens. But go through this experience and it will happen sooner than if you never have it. Moreover, you come out of it somewhat more modest, warier of the gods in general and of Athena in particular, and more reverent of their power and apparent benevolence. Without trying to, you step more gently.

I think that is what happened to Tiresias. He was never blind, except as all humans are. He saw as they saw. Then one day he stumbled upon Athena naked, saw that she floated on air because she had no feet, and he realized that he was blind. But from then on, he saw a different reality — the real thing, as it were. And having some respect for it, he was able to see things that other people did not, most notably the incomprehensible strangeness of human beings and of our world. He could not pretend to understand it or to make friends with it, but he knew it was there. He sensed its presence. He therefore knew better than others did how to navigate through the world without bashing one’s head on the hidden rocks.

One may call that piety. Its more common name is practical good sense.

You will no doubt make of that weird story what you will. But for what it is worth, that is what I make of it.

This is not the sort of truth about ourselves that we are keen to acknowledge or that it is easy to make friends with. It may be the sort that we can only suspect and be wary of. In any case, we meet up with it in the following very old story.

Acteon, a mortal character in Greek mythology, enjoyed hunting. He spent most of his days out in the woods with his bow and arrows and his hunting dogs. He was joined occasionally by Artemis (Diana), goddess of hunting (among other things). You may remember her from sculptures portraying her as an attractive young woman sporting a bow and arrow. How she appeared to Acteon can remain an open question. Perhaps he actually saw her or perhaps he merely felt her presence and heard her enchanting voice in his head. I suspect it was the latter. In any case, she too loved to hunt.

One day he came upon her by accident. She was naked, bathing in some spring. He was stunned by her beauty, to the point of wanting to marry her right then and there. Though she had been his friend up to that point, Artemis was not flattered. She turned him into a stag. No longer recognizing him as their master, his own dogs tore him apart.

Slightly different versions of the story exist, but those are its unvarying main lines. Seeing Artemis naked, Acteon falls in love with her, declares his love, and is consequently turned by her into a stag who ends up killed by his own dogs.

The standard take on the story is that, like Athena, Artemis was obsessively asexual – a sworn virgin. It was therefore awkward for her to be confronted by a fellow inflamed by passions the consummation of which would have compromised her divine identity. And while killing him seems a bit extreme as a solution to that problem, she had to do it in order to prevent him from going around telling stories about how attractive she was from a sexual point of view. She had to protect her image, so to speak.

I think that’s nonsense.

Seeing goddesses naked was generally not a good idea. Apparently, the seer Tiresias owed his blindness to his coming upon Athena one day as she was taking a bath. She too was naked. He could not sustain the sight. He went blind.

If you have seen standard Greek sculptures of Athena, then you will share my suspicion that what happened to Tiresias had nothing to do with her sexual beauty or his desire for her. These things are arguably a matter of taste, but it seems to me that seen as a woman, Athena was decidedly unattractive. Although according to Homer, she has exceptional eyes, she otherwise looks like a man.

I don’t think the Acteon story has anything to do with sexuality either.

Who is Artemis? The goddess of the hunt – a poetic personification of the urge and desire to kill. While that desire can look explainable in humans, in her case it doesn’t. Artemis is a vegetarian or a vegan, supposing that she needs to eat at all. She does not kill game for food. Moreover, unlike human hunters, she cannot possibly derive a thrill from pitting her wits against the resourcefulness of her prey. She is a goddess. There is no contest. So why does she kill? For the sheer joy of doing it! In effect, though cute as a button when portrayed in art, she is the poetic personification of the love of destruction – hardly attractive when seen naked, one would think.

Yet that is what Acteon happens upon, namely Artemis as the naked love of killing. Understandably enough, being a passionate killer himself, he loves her. She is a kindred spirit if he has ever seen one.

There are two ways of taking it from here. The first is what one might call “the moral goody-goody way.” Acteon learns the hard way that finding oneself at the receiving end of the urge to kill makes that urge seem less lovable. Had he survived that learning experience, he would have curbed his enthusiasm for killing. He didn’t survive. But hearing his story, the rest of us will presumably curb ours.

Another way of understanding the story is that there is no making friends with ourselves as killers or destroyers. Although that is what we are in one dimension of our being, and even enjoy being, there is no knowing and embracing ourselves under that description of us. Trying to do that is phenomenally dangerous because we cannot sustain the sight. We end up destroyed by it.

There is no taking Artemis to bed. Trying to gets one killed. But there is no ignoring her either, or pretending that she is something other than she is. The only sane option is wariness when she puts in an appearance in the neighborhood. Or when one finds oneself in neighborhoods where one has good reasons for thinking that she makes her home. Unfortunately for us, those neighborhoods are in us. There is no avoiding them. There is only building and making with their tinge of savagery.

Did I mention that Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo?