Paper Odyssey

The Other Side of Apathy
Preventing Odysseus from going back home and separating a family for almost twenty years, Calypso is supposed to be abused for her ruthlessness and arbitrariness. Nonetheless, from another point of view, Calypso possesses kind of courageous, mercy and, the most significant characteristic, potent and beautiful but pathetic as well.
In the front paragraph of Book5, the poet depicts a beauteous landscape of the homeland of Calypso. It does a homeland of a goddess. “Long-winged bird s nested in the leaves, horned owls and larks and slender-throated shore birds that screech like crows over the bright salt water.”(5, 70) That is a really impressive scene that captures the eyesight and heart of each readers--- such a comely immortal spends all her livelihood in such comparable scenery. Calypso owns a lot, the immortal soul, extraordinary power and impressive appearance with eternally youth, but her lack of love, which makes her keep pursuing and treasuring all her everlasting live，gives rise to her uncontrollable desire to be in possession. It is hard to image there is a prisoner in the landscape. But it is even harder to image such a faultless goddess have to detain her beloved Odysseus by imprisoning him in the distant island. Ironically, Odysseus spends all his day with the beautiful immortal, but his heart is following his beloved wife Penelope, his cherished baby son Telemachus and his honorific homeland Ithaca. “Odysseus was sitting on the shore, as ever those days, honing his heart’s sorrow, starting out to sea with hollow, salt-rimmed eyes.”(5, 85)
Calypso is in the cavern with all her sumptuous layout and palatable ambrosia and meanwhile Odysseus is sitting on the shore, not with the goddess, not to mention his mind, which has already flied away from the remote island to his native land, and similarly from the beautiful immortal to characterless mortal. It must be easy to speculate the thought of Calypso at that time---sort of heart –broken and helpless.
She screams to Odysseus and recount her incomprehension, “You should stay here with me, deathless---Think of it, Odysseus!” (5, 207)In her mind，as long as Odysseus stay here, he will possess a deathless body, a grand place to live, the company of a beautiful goddess and a forever love. She cannot find anything comparable resulting in Odysseus’ departure. She does not want to compare herself, an elegant goddess, to the pale Penelope. However, she does, and she loses. Not only lost to Penelope, but also lost to the family, a word can never been understand by the lonely goddess. What a lugubrious goddess! She considers everything of Odysseus but she does not know the meaning of a family, which is strong enough to resist all the lures. What is more, the inequitable approach that Zeus does leads to a more lugubrious goddess. “I love him, I took care of him, I even told him I’d make immortal and ageless all of his life. But you said it, Hermes: Zeus has the aegis and none of us gods can oppose his will.”(5, 134) On one hand, the courageous goddess is so manful that challenge the authority of the male god---Why all of the male gods have the permission to be unfaithful while the female gods have to be loyal. On the other hand, It seems like she wants to spend her life with Odysseus, but both of the lord of god and the man she loves oppose. Under the will of Zeus, all of her desires, her love and her over ten years’ care have to be deprived. And when she

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