Your Personal Odyssey

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen The Odyssey every day.

…Not literally. Do I look like I have that kind of money?

Trick question. To quote American luminary John Cena, you can’t see me. Right now, my words are the only part of me you see (or hear). I could use more words to describe myself in painstaking detail, every pore on my face and hair on my toes (trust me, I have plenty of both).

That lack of absolute visual definition is true for many literary characters. Until, that is, they appear in film.

This is the starkest difference between books and movies. In the latter—in, say, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey—detail is prescriptive. The color of Agamemnon’s armor is black. The visual aspect of Menelaus is Jon Bernthal, for some reason. The depiction of the Cyclops is really goddamn scary.

If you choose to experience the story through the Nolan film, details are prescribed to two of your five senses. Anyone who watches the film sees and hears the same details: They see Zendaya frowning with memeable disappointment. They hear Ludwig Göransson’s sweeping score.

But what if you experience The Odyssey through words? For centuries, many humans have. There have been other visual retellings of the story, either on screen or on stage, but for the majority of its history, it’s been a story that’s existed only on page or in voice.

So what does your Odysseus look like? What song are your sirens singing? What version of The Odyssey have I been seeing in my mind for the past few weeks?

This is the fundamental difference between books and movies, and I find it fascinating. Movies are prescriptive, but books are descriptive. Movies provide, while books evoke. Thus, the human experience of a book is entirely unique to the human experiencing it.

Take Odysseus, for example. I never pictured him as Matt Damon. For me, he always resembled my high school gym teacher, whose name I can’t quite recall (sorry, high school gym teacher).

This was a younger guy, probably in his late 20s or early 30s, with reddish-brown hair shaved close to his domed scalp, a widow’s peak forming a soundwave-shape across his forehead. I remember him with his arms perpetually crossed, perhaps to accentuate his biceps, which weren’t bulky, but were noticeable. Not yoked, but definitely ripped.

And in terms of personality? He was a nice enough guy, as gym teachers go. But there was an intensity behind his green-eyed gaze, an unspoken understanding that, were our gym class ever to sail between a whirlpool and a monster, some kids would totally be getting devoured. And he had ideas about which ones.

That was my Odysseus. I suspect this was due, in part, to reading the poem in its entirety for the first time in high school (and perhaps attending gym class before or after English). Whatever the reason, I feel safe assuming nobody else on the face of planet Earth ever did or ever will picture the character with the same visage.

I call that a sixth sense. Movies provide exact visual and auditory input. Sure, we all compute those cues differently, but the sights and sounds are the same. Written and spoken stories still appeal to sensory detail, true, but the computation process is much more personal, much less definitive, and yields a more nebulous result. The most common descriptor I know is “the mind’s eye.” Our imaginations.

I find that contrast endlessly fascinating. Would you rather see the sight, or define the sight for yourself? Would you rather use your own two eyes (like Odysseus), or use the eye—the single eye, not plural—within your mind?

By definition, that would make you the Cyclops. And while I can’t answer my question for you, I can tell you this: My personal Cyclops was another unique one. He was my math teacher.

Kyle A. Massa is a comedy author of some sort living somewhere in upstate New York with his wife, their daughter, and three wild animals. His published works include 10 books, along with several short stories, essays, and poems. When he’s not writing, he enjoys reading, running, and drinking cheap coffee.

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