Hilton Head Island: you are what you do; the eighth continent; painted; THE ODYSSEY: A Modern Sequel

 The heading of an opinion piece in yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES:  Remember:  What You Do Is Not Who You Are.  I could not disagree more.

As you undoubtedly know on the lines page of the main site can be found:  What matters is action.  Not to think about writing, but to write.  Not to think about sailing, but to sail.  Not to think about loving, but to love.

http://inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/lines.html

You are exactly what you do,  No more.  No less.  No excuses.

Some of you may already know that scientists have decided that there is an eighth continent which they have named Zealandia after New Zealand which is almost the only part still above water.  I only learned this recently from an article on the BBC site.  I am oddly pleased to think of New Zealand as a continent.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210205-the-last-secrets-of-the-worlds-lost-continent

I hear rain falling on the roof.  I see it splashing on the deck and on Skull Creek.  Rain is forecast for the next week.  I suppose that goes with living in a swamp.

Yesterday was sunny and I went down to GANNET and touched up the paint on the port side of the hull.  I have no idea when I will be able to wax and polish it.

The other side of A Dock is used mostly by transient catamarans on side-ties.  There have been four or five there for months.  Around February 1 they all disappeared.  I asked one of the dock masters about this and he said it was just chance.  They all decided to move on at the same time.  With Arctic cold covering much of this country to the north, I did not ask which direction they took.  Only the derelict ferry boat remains on that side of the dock.  I received some slight good news in that it may be being sold and moved.  Why anyone would buy it except for scrap I do not know, but I hope they do.

I started to reread Nikos Kazantzakis’s THE ODYSSEY:  A Modern Sequel, one of the most influential books of my youth.  I read it first when it was translated into English in 1958.  I was still in high school then.  And I read it again in college a few years later when I wrote an English Literature paper on it.  At both readings I had no experience of sailing oceans and little of women and of life beyond an unpleasant childhood.  

Certainly the poem is epic.  At 33,333 lines for whatever mystical reason it is three times longer than Homer’s ODYSSEY and that is part of the problem.  It would be better if Kazantzakis had stuck to Homer’s length.

I struggled through the first third of the poem in which Kazantzakis’s Ulysses leaves Ithaca with five followers, sails to Sparta where he lures Helen away from Menalaus—the poor man just couldn’t hang onto that woman—continues to Crete where he overthrows the King and then moves on to Africa.  There I had had enough.  To me now the poem is over wrought and repetitive and simplistic. And while it may be the translation, I do not find the poetry the equal of other epics.  

It might also be that I have learned a bit in the past sixty years in light of which what appealed to me at seventeen no longer does at seventy-nine.

I started Sinclair Lewis’s prescient 1935 novel, IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE, instead.