But so few of us know that the great hoplite was given a choice. According to the bard, Achilles’ mother, the sea-goddess Thetis, gave him the choice of two futures. The first was a long and peaceful, but ultimately unremarkable, life. He would return home to Phthia, raise a family, tend to his land and die old in obscurity…

Achilles chose the second option. He chose to go to Troy.

The decision is one of the most profound moments in all of Greek literature, which is filled with such choices. It also reveals that the ancients saw struggle as a requirement for a meaningful life.

This is why the story remains undeniably a classic after 3,000 years. The Ancient Greeks questioned how much one man was willing to sacrifice. Achilles sacrificed longevity for significance. He wagered comfort for the chance of immortality and won.

Achilles’ choice became a model that echoed throughout Western civilisation. Alexander the Great carried a copy of the Iliad during his campaigns in a golden box and is said to have slept with it beneath his pillow. When he visited Troy, he honoured Achilles’ tomb and openly compared himself to the hero.

In turn, Julius Caesar wept before a statue of Alexander because, at the same age, he had achieved comparatively little. Napoleon, too, devoured Plutarch and Homer. He saw himself standing in the long shadow of antiquity, competing with both his living rivals and his dead ones. The hero of Troy became the patron saint of ambition.

These great men carried with them what the blind poet spoke of. That human beings do not live by comfort alone. There exists within certain individuals a desire for achievement that exceeds the instinct for safety. Civilisations are built, oceans crossed and frontiers conquered by people willing to risk failure, ridicule and even death in pursuit of something larger than themselves.

This does not mean recklessness is virtuous. Achilles’ story is not a simple celebration of glory. Homer shows us the terrible cost of his decision. The hero gains everlasting fame, but loses Patroclus, forfeits peace and never returns home.

The Greeks, as a divided people who were no strangers to war and hardship, were too wise to present greatness without its consequence. Yet they also recognised that excessive caution carries a cost of its own. A person may avoid danger but later be haunted by regret. The safe road might guarantee survival, but it rarely promises meaning.

We know Achilles’ dilemma was not about sacking Troy, but about dying with a sense of accomplishment. Since that day on, every generation has faced the same choice.

Most of us will never choose to stand before the walls of Troy and demand a fight. But all of us have to make a choice. It is no wonder we are still compelled by Homer’s epics. Each generation must figure out what it is willing to sacrifice before time runs out.

As the myth goes, the throne of Iolcus was usurped by Pelias from his half-brother Aeson, Jason’s father. Pelias gave Jason the impossible test of retrieving the Golden Fleece, but knew it would get rid of his nephew so that he could retain power.

But for Jason and the Argonauts, the Golden Fleece became ambition incarnate. In retrieving it, Jason would prove his claim to the throne of Iolcus, but what then? Once the perilous journey was over, what else is there to strive for?

The quest itself has become one of the most enduring stories in Greek mythology. Jason assembles the Argonauts – the sailors aboard the Argo – and slays monsters, navigates impossible trials and wins the favour of Medea, the daughter of the King Aeëtes.

Jason ultimately secures the prize that had seemed beyond the reach of mortal men.

The Greeks didn’t end their stories with a happily ever after. That isn’t how life goes. They followed a story to its true conclusion, even if it meant that a heroic tale ends in tragedy. The Greeks asked: “What happens 20 years from now?”

After Jason found the Golden Fleece, his marriage deteriorated. His family fell apart. The glory of his youth faded into a distant memory…

In some versions of the myth, he eventually died alone beneath the rotting remnants of the Argo. In others, he was crushed by the very ship that carried him to greatness.

So often we tell ourselves that once we obtain the Golden Fleece everything else will fall into place. Two thousand years later, Anton Chekhov explored a similar idea in his story The Bet.

The Bet follows a wealthy banker who wagers that no man could endure 15 years of solitary confinement voluntarily. A young lawyer accepts the challenge in exchange for an enormous sum of money. Over the years, the prisoner devours books with the same intensity that Jason searches for the fleece.

The prisoner studies languages, history, philosophy, theology, literature and science and spends fifteen years in the pursuit of knowledge. The fortune waits patiently for him.

But something remarkable happens. On the eve of his release, he abandons the prize by climbing out of the window and disappearing into the night.

After immersing himself in the accumulated wisdom of centuries, the once-young lawyer comes to regard material wealth as meaningless. The two million rubles that once seemed worth sacrificing fifteen years of his life for have mysteriously lost all value.

Both stories seem to arrive at the same uncomfortable conclusion. The Golden Fleece can be seized. The bet can be won. But the harder task is reckoning whether it was what you truly wanted in the first place.

Perhaps the tragedy is not that we fail to seize the Golden Fleece, but that we do not account for what comes after.

But not Odysseus. He chose to weather the stormy, wine-dark seas in the hope to return to his kingdom of Ithaca.

After twenty years of war, wandering and suffering, Homer’s hero finally arrived upon the island of Ogygia, the home of the nymph Calypso. The immortal goddess offered him everything he could desire, including immortality and herself.

Day after day he sat on the sand and gazed longingly out across the sea. Odysseus became miserable on Ogygia and stood upon the shore weeping hopelessly because he had no way of returning home after his ship was destroyed.

Then at last Zeus commanded Calypso to release him. In Robert Fagles’ translation, the nymph told Odysseus that if he truly knew the suffering awaiting him before he reached home, he would remain with her and become immortal.

Despite capturing Odysseus’ mind and body on the island with her temptations, she could never capture his heart. Calypso tells Odysseus the truth about what awaited him if he left her island, yet the hero would not be swayed.

(Calypso) “So then,
royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, man of exploits,
still eager to leave at once and hurry back
to your own home, your beloved native land?
Good luck to you, even so. Farewell!
But if you only knew, down deep, what pains
are fated to fill your cup before you reach that shore,
you’d stay right here, preside in our house with me
and be immortal…”

Homer’s The Odyssey (Robert Fagles translation)

Beyond the horizon lies Poseidon’s wrath. The god of the sea still seeks revenge against the cunning Ithacan’s hubris. Odysseus knows this, yet he leaves anyway.

Odysseus can avoid hardship altogether and live in abundance, yet he chooses the opposite. His heart yearns to return to the shores of Ithaca and to hold his home, wife and son in his eyes once again.

Calypso offers eternity, her palace, herself, but she cannot offer Odysseus what he desires most. Astonished at the mortal hero’s integrity and loyalty to his homeland, the temptress renews her efforts to keep him ensnared. However, Odysseus smiles back.

“Ah great goddess,”
worldly Odysseus answered, “don ’t be angry with me,
please. All that you say is true, how well I know.
Look at my wise Penelope. She falls far short of you,
your beauty, stature. She is mortal after all
and you, you never age or die …
Nevertheless I long—I pine, all my days—
to travel home and see the dawn of my return…”

Homer’s The Odyssey (Robert Fagles translation)

It does not need to be explained in any other way. Perhaps this is why this moment remains so powerful after three thousand years. Many of us would choose immortality. But Odysseus risked death to return home.

Indeed, his name is Prometheus, which means “Forethought”, while later he would be remembered as the “Lightbringer”. But, in so doing, Zeus did not only punish Prometheus, but mankind too. And so, the king atop Mount Olympus created women.

But why was fire so important to the gods? Why did Zeus intend to keep it out of our reach?

To the ancient Greek imagination, fire was more than warmth or light. It allowed us to accelerate. Fire changed our very trajectory on earth, allowing us to cook food, forge metal weapons, harden tools and push back against the darkness that had long belonged to the predators of the wilderness.

Before fire, mankind was at the mercy of nature. Winter claimed countless lives and the lurking beasts of the night carried off the weak. Fire changed that forever. It narrowed the gap between man and nature and gave us something that had previously been a mystery of the gods.

But power comes at a cost. And the greater the power, the greater the consequence. Indeed, Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountain where an eagle descended each day to devour his liver. And each night it regenerated, only for the torment to begin again.

Today it is clear there is a new godly fire that may just be the latest Promethean gift: Artificial Intelligence.

When Prometheus stole fire, Zeus punished not only the titan but mankind itself. According to Hesiod, he fashioned Pandora and sent her among mortals as a beautiful “deception”. Hidden within her jar were countless sorrows waiting to be released upon the world.

Artificial intelligence bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Pandora’s Box. There is the promise of abundant knowledge, yet no one can say with certainty what else may pour from it. Once it becomes woven into every aspect of human life, AI may prove impossible to separate from the troubles it unleashes.

Unlike fire, which simply improved human survival, AI may propel us further than any invention since the mastery of fire. Fire changed our surroundings, but AI will change the mind itself.

AI can answer questions, analyse information, generate ideas and perform intellectual tasks that previously required years of intense training and academic study. Knowledge itself, once scarce and hard to obtain, has become increasingly available and on demand.

Already, university students studying nursing, physics or law are using AI to write essays. Programmers increasingly rely on machine-generated code, while professionals across countless industries consult algorithms before major decisions.

In this sense, artificial intelligence does not help humanity compete with nature. AI may help humanity compete with the gods.

For thousands of years, omniscience was considered a divine attribute. The gods knew the mysteries of the universe us mere mortals could not comprehend. Today, ordinary people can consult a machine capable of accessing and processing more information than any individual could absorb in a lifetime. And it can do it in seconds.

Have we not acquired something that feels suspiciously close to an external intelligence? What punishment accompanies this gift?

While many fear job losses, misinformation, automation, security breaches, data farming or surveillance, what if the real danger dwarfed all of these? What if the deeper danger was outsourcing thought itself? In that case, all the other concerns become secondary.

Prometheus gave humanity the fire, but he did not give humanity wisdom. While AI remains a tool now, soon we will become so intertwined with it that it becomes necessary to rely on it for daily tasks.

Why struggle through a difficult problem if a machine can solve it? Why spend years acquiring expertise if an algorithm can provide an instant answer? Why wrestle with an argument if a machine can write one for you?

Soon, technology may tempt us to surrender the responsibility to think for ourselves. What then?

A civilisation that delegates too much labour grows weak and unequipped to maintain it. A civilisation that delegates too much thought…time will tell.

If Prometheus narrowed the distance between man and nature, artificial intelligence may narrow the distance between man and god.

Therefore, if every gift contains a punishment, one must wonder if our eagle has begun its descent.

When he had built this fine but evil creature,

the price for fire, he led her out to the other gods

and mortals, resplendent in the adornments

of Zeus’ grey-eyed daughter. Gods and men

alike were awed when they saw the steep

deception, which men could never control.

For she was mother to the race of females,

who live with men but are their greatest foe,

always a friend of luxury, never of poverty.

…

so also did high-thundering Zeus create women

to be the bane of mortal men, partners in painful

deeds. And he exchanged another good for evil:

he who flees marriage and women’s foul deeds

and refuses to marry comes to old age deprived

of a caretaker; when he lives, he lacks nothing,

but when he dies his relatives divide his fortune

-Hesiod’s Theogony (Michael Heumann translation)

Recently I have been revising Kenneth Clark’s 1969 tour de force “Civilisation”. It got me thinking about the definition of civilisation and what we mean when we say “Western civilisation” or “the Western tradition”.

Throughout time, the myths have been retold in a myriad of ways. Unorthodox cast members or modern techniques are peripheral and secondary to the real priority. That is, the core of the myth must be told as it was intended. The heart of the myth must survive.

Upon re-listening to The Odyssey, read by the inimitable Sir Ian McKellen, I was able to revisit a detail in the story I had all but forgotten. The introduction of Telemachus, the hero’s son, who is waiting desperately for Odysseus to return made me realise this: a civilisation collapses when sons stop believing their fathers are worth searching for.

When Homer begins his tale, Ithaca is already in disarray and Odysseus is idle, faraway on the island of Calypso. The suitors feast endlessly in his halls, consuming his wealth, mocking his son and competing for his wife, Penelope.

Telemachus is left drifting helplessly through his own home like a ghost, waiting for his father to return. This is when the “bright-eyed” Athena arrives.

Importantly, Athena does not rescue Telemachus and make all his problems disappear. No, she does something far more potent. She awakens Telemachus. Disguised as Mentes, she pushes him to search for news of his father and leave Ithaca behind. The goddess in disguise gives Telemachus something more valuable than comfort – purpose.

The journey is psychological as much as it is physical and emotional.

Telemachus seeks his father because he seeks orientation. His father represents endurance, cunning, sacrifice and responsibility, virtues that he had taken for granted. Virtues that keep Ithaca in check but have since become increasingly absent from the kingdom around him.

Even in the minor aspect of the grander story there is deep and enduring meaning. The Greeks saw adulthood as requiring initiation and that responsibility was a privilege. Can we say the same about today’s culture?

We increasingly mistake endless adolescence for freedom. Too many of us drift through distraction and consumption and hardly seek anything worthy of our reverence. Ironically, modernity eschews tradition as superstition.

The suitors in The Odyssey symbolise this perfectly. They consume endlessly while producing nothing. They mock authority while possessing none themselves. They eat and drink Odysseus’ meat and wine but offer nothing in return. They are entitled imposters.

Athena pushes Telemachus onward and upward instead of comforting him. She calls him toward difficulty, uncertainty, maturity. The goddess of wisdom does not remove the burden. She reveals the road.

Athena came to his prayer from close at hand,

and she urged him on with winging words: “Telemachus,

you’ll lack neither courage nor sense from this day on,

not if your father’s spirit courses through your veins—

now there was a man, I’d say, in words and action both!

So how can your journey end in shipwreck or defeat?

—Homer’s The Odyssey (Robert Fagles’ translation)

Through Plutarch and Ovid, we learn the Ancient Greeks were tapping into something deeply psychological. Daedalus, the master craftsman who designed the labyrinth beneath Crete, created a structure so intricate and disorienting that escape was almost impossible – even for him.

Yet hidden within the myth lies the Freudian implication which is often overlooked: the architect himself needed to create the thread so he could escape his own design.

No man, no matter his genius, can build a maze to trap a fearsome, devouring monster and know the way out from memory alone. This truth becomes most apparent when we reflect on the labyrinths we create ourselves, often unwittingly.

The Czech writer Franz Kafka had to have read the Metamorphoses! His works feel strangely reminiscent to the Ancient Greek stories, and the tale of Theseus and the labyrinth feel strangely modern, even Kafkaesque. The labyrinth is not merely a prison of stone corridors, but a system expanding beyond human comprehension. Endless passages, repetitions and dead ends disorient the psyche until confusion and despair become the punishment.

Kafka’s semi-autobiographical protagonists wander through opaque bureaucracies and convoluted castles governed by rules and more rules that no one can fully understand. In The Trial, Josef K. is trapped inside a judicial process whose logic remains permanently obscured and mysteriously beyond understanding. In The Castle, the goal is visible yet unattainable. Both are filled with an escalating unease and horror, but which is more disorienting? The known or the unknown?

Modern work-life increasingly resembles this strange condition. Workers wander through train stations, bureaucracies, algorithms, institutions, identity crises and endless digital systems which coil back on themselves like the Cretan maze.

Every corridor promises re-orientation and reward, but all we find is yet another corridor. The labyrinth perpetuates itself as long as we run through it searching for the exit. At some point we must run into the Minotaur, whatever, whoever, wherever that may be.

Jorge Luis Borges pushed this idea even further in The House of Asterion. His Minotaur was not merely the archetypal monster, but a lonely consciousness wandering infinite halls in complete isolation. Asterion was an analogy for the lost soul, the mistaken identity, the Kafkaesque character whose reality is not what it seems.

Borges took the horror of the labyrinth and made it psychological. The cavernous stone became ornamental chambers of a luxury, sea-side chateau. The prisoners were hide-and-seek playmates for the prince. (Until, of course, the arrival of Theseus.)

That aside, modern man has increasingly come to resemble Asterion. These disorienting corridors at some point become familiar. Our confusion becomes ordinary, our isolation more ambient and personal.

In other words, the labyrinth has expanded faster than the thread can trace. Ariadne’s thread is psychologically profound as it symbolises more than mere escape. It represents orientation itself. It is Daedalus’ lifeline connecting the individual to something between tangible and intangible.

How long is a piece of string? So the idiom goes. The answer: as long as it needs to be.

Theseus can slay the Minotaur, but without the thread he would have perished in that endless darkness. Heroism without orientation disintegrates into a flailing, unmoored wandering. Passion without focus is doomed to procrastination.

A labyrinth without a Minotaur may be even more terrifying in the long run. At least the monster gave the maze a purpose, an endpoint, a climactic resolution.

Our life is not a search for the way out of the labyrinth, but an ongoing couture session as we weave the twine that gives us meaning.

Great Daedalus of Athens was the man
That made the draught, and form’d the wondrous plan;
Where rooms within themselves encircled lye,
With various windings, to deceive the eye.
…

Now pointing upward to its ancient source,
Such was the work, so intricate the place,
That scarce the workman all its turns cou’d trace;
And Daedalus was puzzled how to find
The secret ways of what himself design’d.

These private walls the Minotaur include,
Who twice was glutted with Athenian blood:
But the third tribute more successful prov’d,
Slew the foul monster, and the plague remov’d.
When Theseus, aided by the virgin’s art,
Had trac’d the guiding thread thro’ ev’ry part,
He took the gentle maid, that set him free,
And, bound for Dias, cut the briny sea…

—Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden translation)

At first you hear its footsteps echoing through the chamber. A grunt and a snort carry through the stagnant air. A vague shadow moves across the wall. Then you see it. First as a silhouette. Then the beast itself, with a faint, bloodshot glimmer in its eyes. The stories were true and there is nowhere to run.

In Greek mythology, seven youths and seven maidens were sent from Athens to Crete every seven years as a sacrifice to the beast. This way the king of Crete, Minos, could avenge the death of his son, Androgeos.

King Minos and his wife Queen Pasiphae had a beautiful daughter named Ariadne. Yet, Queen Pasiphae was cursed by Poseidon after King Minos disrespected the god. For his refusal to sacrifice a white bull, Poseidon forced Minos’ wife to mate with and bear the child of the Cretan bull. That would make Ariadne the half-sister of Asterion, more commonly known as the Minotaur.

Horrified at the sight of Asterion – the name of the beast – King Minos ordered Daedalus to construct a labyrinth to hide the bastard child away. The labyrinth was so complex, with countless corridors looping endlessly, that the Minotaur had no chance of escape. Even Daedalus had trouble escaping it.

One day, Theseus decided to end the Athenians’ suffering and volunteered to go along with the tributes to the labyrinth. He promised his father, King Aegeus of Athens, that if he was successful in slaying the Minotaur, he would take down the black sails of grief and return home with white sails as a herald of victory for his people.

Upon the arrival of Theseus at Crete, Ariadne fell in love with him at first sight. She promised Theseus she would marry him if he slew the beast, but in order to do so, he needed to know how to find his way out.

In the most common retelling of this myth, Ariadne gave Theseus a bronze sword and a special ball of twine gifted to her by Daedalus. Without it, escape would be hopeless.

He could only escape the labyrinth with the twine created by the architect of the maze.

Despite the noble-born Theseus being exempt from the conscription, he chose to be among his fellow Athenians in their journey to the maze. Theseus volunteered to share the danger of his people.

Each day King Aegeus had waited to see white sails on the horizon until he saw black ones instead. Filled with anguish for his son he threw himself into the sea and drowned.

Theseus escaped the labyrinth but not its consequences. The Minotaur was not the last thing waiting for him, and so the black sails remained on the mast.

…the Sirens failed not to note the swift ship as it drew near, and they raised their clear-toned song: “Come hither, as thou farest, renowned Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans; stay thy ship that thou mayest listen to the voice of us two. For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.”

— Homer, The Odyssey, Book 12

Sirens were not known for dragging sailors over the bulwarks and into the sea. No, they lured them willingly toward their demise. The ferocity of violence is not the danger, but the strength of their attraction.

In Homer’s Odyssey, the Sirens sing to passing sailors with voices so irresistible that men abandon all reason. They even lose their survival instinct simply to hear them sing their songs.

While the ancient Greeks depicted the Sirens as birdlike creatures, artistic interpretations through the centuries have portrayed them as seductive and erotic temptresses, combing their hair on the jagged rocks littered with bones.

Nowadays, the Sirens have taken on yet another form.

Social media, gambling apps, outrage algorithms and endless digital stimulation rarely overpower us directly but sing to us softly. Temptation has become engineered.

Odysseus survives the Sirens not because he is stronger than temptation, but because he recognises himself as vulnerable. The cunning captain orders his crew to fill their ears with wax and to tie him to the mast, so that he can hear the Sirens’ song but cannot steer the ship toward the rocks.

This is one of the oldest psychological truths ever written: sometimes discipline means creating structures that protect us from ourselves.

Modern culture encourages the opposite of this. Our culture encourages impulse. It tells us indulgence is freedom, stimulation is the cure to boredom. Attention is a commodity harvested by algorithms designed to exploit human weakness.

Don’t you feel that endless temptation has scattered your mind? Have we lost, for the most part, the capacity for sustained thought, contemplation and silence? The Sirens are not out at sea on some rock, they are in our pocket.

Perhaps this is why the myth still endures. The Sirens change shape but temptation doesn’t. They symbolise the human tendency to move willingly toward what destroys us over and over again, the mistake of confusing seduction for freedom.

That is the tragedy of the Sirens. Not that they sing, but that we listen.

As in eternal starlight

The wooden horse comes to plunder.

It’s heard only in the quiet moments,

The times of grating clarity

When the heart awakes

— Restless, faceless, helpless,

And is brought asunder

With beating blades.

Now, as he flies to the sun,

The boiling God, flayed

In wax melting beam

He meets the sea and sinks under.

And rests with the countless dead who never ventured so far,

All while shadows of the bull-man full tilt

Roar with a father’s rage.

Only now one learns twine can only be followed once it’s laid.

Where does the owl go when night dies?

Ancient kings with arms outstretched,

Making the endless mock of men

But catching the call of silent curses.

And when a dozen snapping jaws

Turn into scaly smiles—

Only the fire of purpose kills them.

Alpha, theta, epsilon –

Take your chalice of hemlock or be swallowed.

In this hour I call to the Ancients,

The Gods, the beasts.

Seen in shadows with chanting hearts,

Heard beneath frozen seas

With bellowing tides above.

In this hour I fly with the Ancients,

The heroes, the martyrs.

As silent as a desert-bound owl,

Adrift with the inner rhythm of

Unsung truths and noble cause.

In this hour I pray to the ancients,

The tyrants, the kings.

They hum the endless dream

As loud as the banished thunder

Of a thousand universes.

Where does the owl go when the night dies?

It’s Ancient wisdom.

The very same that guides

The arrow down the gilded line.

When dawn comes and prayers are met with whispers,

Eternal starlight’s fated glow flings

Golden epiphanies down like rain

With the sweet sound of dropping crowns.

But what makes this myth so grotesque and disturbingly compelling? It is not merely the gruesome carnage and violence, with Goya’s grisly painting coming to mind, but the familiar paranoia of being succeeded, overtaken, forgotten.

Philosophers such as Cicero said the myth of Chronos – who the Romans referred to as Saturn – swallowing his children was an allegory of Time devouring everything it creates.

…the habit of devouring his sons signifies that Time devours the ages and gorges itself insatiably on the past years.

— Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Book II, Section 64

Prophecy warned Chronos, the king of the Titans, that one of his sons would usurp him. So what did he do? He swallowed each of them whole at birth.

But Chronos could not account for Rhea, his wife, concealing the young infant Zeus in a cave while he instead devoured a stone wrapped in swaddling cloth.

Could our self-sabotage be a modern form of Chronos devouring his legacy? After all, our children are versions of us.

Human beings are often destroyed less by external enemies than by the fear of what might become of them.

Rather than face the uncertainty of succession, Chronos consumed the future itself.

We live in a time that constantly devours its own potential. Many ideas are interrupted before they can mature and deepen. Ambitions are abandoned before they have a chance to be realised. Everything is reacted to instantly, consumed immediately, replaced endlessly.

Perhaps this is why Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son remains so haunting. We recognise the horror instinctively, perhaps because we participate in it ourselves on a daily basis.

We consume our attention, our time, our focus, our creative energy, our own dreams before they can transform into anything fruitful and lasting.

Chronos is no longer an obscure Titan from Greek mythology, or a subject of art. He has become the outlook of modernity.

And yet the myth contains a warning as much as a tragedy. Zeus survives because he is hidden away in secret while Chronos swallows the decoy. The future escapes even the most drastic wrath.

In this way, not every ambition should be announced. Nor every idea exposed and declared immediately. Some things should remain hidden while they are still fragile.

Otherwise, Chronos will swallow them whole.

The Ancient Greeks would have understood the smartphone immediately.

Not the technology itself, of course, but the psychological petrification that occurs when we gaze into the screen. They understood that human beings are destroyed less often by force than by fascination and temptation.

Our mistake is considering mythology as primitive storytelling, but the myths of old continue to warn us of our own human nature. The monsters may change shape but our weaknesses have not.

Modern retellings flatten Medusa into a feminist symbol or a generic monster, but the original terror of the Gorgon is deeply psychological. To look directly upon her is to become petrified. Not killed violently, but immobilised.

Athena, the goddess of wisdom, assists Perseus on his quest to bring back Medusa’s head. The goddess leads Perseus to the city of Deicterion in Samos, where images of the three Gorgons are displayed so that he can distinguish Medusa from her immortal sisters.

With his polished shield, Perseus could only look upon Medusa as a reflection. With winged sandals and a magic pouch to carry Medusa’s decapitated head, Perseus travels to the Land of the Hyperboreans where he finds the sisters sleeping.

With Athena guiding his hand, Perseus cuts off her head. Without a moment to lose, Perseus fled the scene as Medusa’s sisters awoke.

The myth of Perseus and Medusa, once seen symbolically, perfectly illustrates the danger of the oversaturated imagination. Many people no longer contemplate a singular image, but submit to many of them. Endless visual stimulation freezes the imagination, perhaps not into stone, but into passivity.

We scroll through faces, landscapes, tragedies, wars, weddings, summer, winter, life at such velocity that the soul cannot metabolise any of it. The Greeks understood that some things should not be looked at directly for too long.

Symbols allow us to approach terrifying truths gradually and safely. Myth, ritual and metaphor act as our reflective shield between us and the overwhelming reality of the world.

Modernity has shattered that shield. Now everything is explicit to win our attention. Not only are images hyper-visible, but they are also immediate and come without warning.

Nothing is left symbolic because symbolism requires patience and interpretation. Instead we are flooded with direct imagery until perception itself becomes exhausted, before hardening into cynicism and the craving for stronger stimuli.

If we stare directly at horror and beauty for too long, both will lose meaning. But before we turn to stone, we can shield ourselves from the Gorgon’s gaze. We just need to know when not to look.

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

— Dante’s Inferno

Dante’s opening lines describe more than spiritual confusion. They perfectly describe how every difficult creative pursuit begins.

Most writers start with inspiration. A novel, screenplay or painting appears to us vividly, it even seems destined for greatness. But eventually, after the writer enters the dark wood, that once straightforward pathway disappears from beneath our feet.

It is once this path disappears that most projects die on the vine.

There must be a million cabinet drawers holding a million unfinished manuscripts! Too often do ambitious artists abandon their work when it is no longer pleasurable. Finishing something difficult has become a source of pain. While inspiration might flatter us, let the finished work be the judge of us.

Dante understood that before reaching Paradise one must first descend into (and climb out of) Inferno.

The Inferno of creativity, however, is not dramatic. This journey through Inferno requires rewrites, self-doubt, rejection, exhaustion and the creeping suspicion that your work may never become what you hoped it would be. Every artist eventually encounters the inscription above the gates of hell:

“Abandon every hope, ye who enter here.”

At some point, if the writer lets doubt overtake them, they lose faith in their work. That intoxicating early passion fades and so does the strength to carry on.

This is why so many people begin a project but never finish them. They fall in love with inspiration but recoil from the suffering involved in creation. Dante, however, did not freeze before the gates of hell, or retrace his footsteps out of the forest. He walks through the gates and descends into hell.

As Dante and his guide, Virgil, spiral down through Inferno, each new circle becomes a new confrontation with spiritual weakness. Vanity, distraction, cowardice and self-deception are as abundant as the souls that dwell in hell.

Dante must have reminded himself constantly that Inferno is not the destination.

After descending through hell, Dante emerges again beneath the stars:

“And thence we came forth to see again the stars.”

And here begins the ascent to Purgatorio — which represent creative revision.

It is the slow purification of the work. The excess is removed after weakness is confronted. The artist kills their darlings once inspiration hardens into discipline.

Unlike Inferno, which is chaos, Purgatory is ordered suffering. Passing through each circle equips us with a deeper and deeper insight into our work. Through this process we improve ourselves and our art.

Modernity has little-to-no patience for this stage. It seems that announcements are celebrated more than completion. People speak constantly about what they are “working on,” as though intention itself is an accomplishment.

Dante did not think so. The ascent of Mount Purgatory is slow, repetitive and humbling. But it can be done and only after enduring this climb does Dante finally reach Paradise.

At the conclusion of Paradiso, after the long descent then ascent, Dante experiences the vision he had pursued from the beginning:

“The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

Completion brings a peculiar peace. Not because the work is perfect, but because it finally exists. The story has moved from the imagination and into reality.

Most people remain trapped in the dark wood. Sometimes, they descend into Inferno before retreating. Some survive hell only to abandon the exhausting climb through Purgatory.

Very few continue all the way through the clouds and into the final stage.

The artist who finishes something knows that inspiration was never the destination. It was merely the invitation to begin the journey.

Great stories rarely force meaning upon us in a direct way. They allow silence to do the heavy lifting. The Ancient Greeks understood this instinctively, as we do in the modern world and suffer for the lack of it.

The Oracle of Delphi did not hand out instruction manuals, she spoke in fragments and riddles because direct revelation weakens meaning. The listener was forced to wrestle with interpretation and extract the wisdom from it.

Meaning is found in ambiguity rather than certainty.

The Greeks developed a mode of storytelling that is best absorbed into the soul. Their myths endure because symbolism engages with something permanent in human nature. The meanings behind Odysseus’ wandering, Prometheus’ punishment or Orpheus turning back toward Eurydice are never exhausted.

Let us linger on Orpheus. He goes down into the underworld and is given permission to lead Eurydice back to the living world on one condition: he must not look back at her until they reach the surface. The myth never fully explains why he turns. Doubt? Love? Fear? Impatience? Expectation? Perhaps all of these rolled into one? We are not told, but we know.

Modern writers distrust silence, which is distrust for the reader. They explain the emotion in the image. They explain the symbolism within the metaphor. They explain the character after the action. There are two compelling reasons for this.

The first is obvious. Films and television have reordered our imaginations to emphasise the visual image. The grand mistake is thinking if a picture paints a thousand words, a thousand words must paint a picture.

The second is that our education system seems to punish ambiguity with bad grades. Our essays must explain why the curtain is blue.

Likewise, in tragedy, pioneered by the Greeks, what remains unsaid often carries the deepest emotional force. A restrained sentence can wound more deeply than an entire speech because the reader participates in the very construction of the feeling behind the words not spoken.

There is a real difference between vagueness and silence. Vagueness arises when the writer does not know what they mean, while silence is due to the diligence of the writer who knows exactly what not to say.

The strongest writers understand restraint. They trust the image, the pause, the implication and the symbol. Most importantly, they trust the reader.

Books are written about books. Metaphors, double entendres and literary symbolism are dissected on the altar of criticism and analysis. Artworks in galleries are accompanied with plaques detailing the artist’s motivation and method.

Modern life has destroyed artistic mystery through overexposure, oversaturation and endless explanation. Writers explain too much now out of fear they will be misunderstood.

Since when is being misunderstood a cardinal sin?

Symbolism in art and literature has steadily weakened, leaving us in a room with the vulgar, the grotesque and, worst of all, the banal. Too often writers and artists present us with work that leaves nothing to the imagination, weakening it and leaving us unchanged.

It is partly the commodification of art, partly the domination of analytical and scientific thinking, and partly the disintegration of symbolic life that has removed mystery from art. Why must everything be explained and explicit?

In art and literature, it’s okay to be misunderstood. In fact, it is preferable. In a world of corporate presentations, shareholder meetings, graphs and spreadsheets, let art retain some ambiguity.

The Greeks understood that mystery intensifies truth. With the birth of tragedy came poetry and the tenets of storytelling were forged. Down through the centuries that followed, mystery and ambiguity have motivated us to entertain each other with myths and explore the unknown.

The Oracle of Delphi, for example, spoke in riddles not to be deceptive, but because direct revelation diminishes the weight of personal interpretation.

King Croesus of Lydia asked the Oracle whether he should wage war with Persia. The Oracle replied: ‘If Croesus goes to war, he will destroy a great empire.’ The King believed this meant Persia, and so he invaded. The empire he destroyed was his own.

This tells us that the prophecy was true, but the ambiguity forced interpretation, for good or ill, and meaning emerged through human arrogance, assumption and the power of our inner desires and fears.

Like the Oracle of Delphi, great art speaks to us indirectly. The audience must complete the meaning, even if they misunderstand it entirely. This requires an artist to say what they want to say and leave the interpretation to the reader.

We still debate Hamlet, Kafka and the Mona Lisa precisely because they resist final explanation. Symbols survive because they cannot be exhausted and keep us wondering even centuries later.

All writers look up to someone. Every writer inherits a voice before discovering their own.

The thin line between envy and jealousy is easy to see but hard to navigate. Jealousy is ugly when it is directed at someone else’s success, but creative envy is fuelled by ambition.

When a writer reads something brilliant, they feel admiration, humiliation and inspiration all at once.

For me it was reading the words ‘isn’t it pretty to think so’ at the end of A Sun Also Rises.

For others it might be ‘I have not broken your heart – you have broken it…’ in Wuthering Heights.

Simple lines often disturb and dislocate because they express something we failed to say ourselves. We go through life feeling more than we can put into words. But when someone manages to do it, we realise we are not alone. Let the compass of creative envy guide you.

Harold Bloom summed it up well by calling it the “anxiety of influence”. Writers wrestle with their predecessors. Influence is equal parts reverence and rivalry.

In Pushkin’s retelling, Salieri recognised Mozart’s genius and hated him for it. But later, after Mozart’s death, he realises he was in the presence of a transcendent genius and admired him.

As I have said previously, in Taste versus talent, the great frustration of a writer is knowing what is bad in their writing but being unable to fix it. And since we read more great literature than we could ever hope to write, this is where our creative envy begins and the compass starts to spin.

Our taste is formed by what we consume. And once we discover our sentimentality from reading, we hope to write in ways that move others as we were moved ourselves.

This is why it is important to copy the masters for their technique, but to train ourselves to say things in our own way. We all live different lives and see things differently.

We can let our creative envy point us in the right direction. It guides us toward the standards we want our own work to reach. Everything else is a matter of putting pen to paper.

If you say you lack ideas, I shall say you lack the right conditions for ideas. There are three requirements which, if balanced correctly, will yield you an idea, or several, for your next piece of writing.

The requirements are: movement, isolation and attention.

One is physical, one is intellectual, and one is a bit of both.

Walking

“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Simply, movement loosens thought.

One would think running brings about the best ideas. They don’t come from effort, but from release. Leisurely movement allows for contemplation. Rigorous exercise trains the body, not the mind.

Walking in solitude brings contemplation. It is the hinge that the other two requirements swing on. Remove one of these elements and the chain breaks.

Solitude/Isolation

“Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.”

— Nikola Tesla

How can you expect to think for yourself if you’re never by yourself?

We are often alone, but not with ourselves. Too often we resort to watching a TV show or listening to an audiobook, rarely do we sit and allow ourselves to think.

Solitude is chosen, not accidental. These constant inputs dull creativity. One needs distance from other voices in order to hear their own.

Contemplation/Attention

“Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature.”

— Auguste Rodin

Ideas spring into the mind. But deeper ones require sustained attention. Scrolling social media or reacting to videos do not come into it. An idea is only as good as the time given to it. As a plant requires watering, new ideas require contemplation.

People interrupt themselves before they can think. People cross the road looking at their phone. The phone has even replaced the window, out of which we used to gaze and reflect.

Contemplation turns ideas into something we can use. Who knows how many great ideas you have forfeited with fleeting distractions.

For it is true, writers do not lack ideas. They lack the conditions required to catch them.

We read more great literature than we could ever hope to write. That’s the dilemma: taste has outgrown talent.

Taste is what you recognise as great. Talent is what you can produce. The wider the gap, the greater the frustration.

The good news is that a decent writer can see the gap. Bad writers produce and publish crap without knowing it.

The bad news is that in order to close the gap you must write more crap and get it out of your system, like bloodletting.

In Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, he recounts a fable between the famous Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius who competed against each other. The former could paint grapes “so true to nature” they would attract birds.

Zeuxis, “elated by the verdict of the birds” called on Parrhasius to draw back the curtain and reveal his painting. However, Zeuxis discovered that the curtain was the painting and surrendered the prize to Parrhasius.

Zeuxis could fool an animal. Parrhasius could fool Zeuxis.

Pliny then recounts that Zeuxis painted a boy to carry the grapes, but when the birds flew down once again he was so annoyed at his work that he said:

“I have painted the grapes better than the boy, for had I been perfectly successful with the latter, the birds must have been afraid.”

Zeuxis recognised the failure. His taste was outperforming his execution. While his eye might know what’s missing, his hand was unable to deliver it.

Indeed, consistency beats raw talent. It is the writer who can endure their frustration that will prove successful.

The race is not between starting a story and finishing it, but in crossing the gap between talent and taste. The wider the gap, the better the writer – if they can endure it.

Here’s how you make it:

- 30 ml Bourbon whiskey, (preferably Makers Mark)

- 30 ml Amaro Montenegro

- 30 ml Aperol

- 30 ml fresh lemon juice

After the ingredients are shaken with ice, the drink is served straight up in a Nick and Nora glass.

It is the perfect cocktail because it is simple and appeals to every hemisphere of the senses.

Firstly, it tastes fresh, citrusy and rich. The orange aromas of the Aperol, along with the lemon juice, provides the best counterweight to the whiskey and pairs perfectly with the Amaro.

One recalls the story in Plato’s Symposium of Zeus splitting the humans to weaken them. Originally, man and woman were bound together and were complete beings with four arms, four legs, and two faces — the “androgynous species”. This separation created a lifelong longing for one’s “other half”.

We know this as finding one’s soulmate.

In this way, the ingredients shaken into the The Paper Plane find each other at last.

Next, it is visually pleasing. Just look at the colour of it. Like autumn leaves, or sunsets on the sand, or toasty fireplaces in the Scottish Highlands.

The aroma of it, too, is like a vineyard.

To the touch it is chilled, the glass, hopefully, filled.

While you cannot hear a drink, per se, nothing is as enjoyable as the sound of bartender shaking and pouring it with a controlled splash into a chilled glass.

Then, once enjoyed, it is like flying on a paper plane into the memory of why life is worth living.

Zeus, having found a solution, not without difficulty, […] he cut men in two. Now, when the body had been thus divided, each man, longing for his other half, went to it; and embracing and hugging one another with the desire to merge together […]

It is from this moment that the innate love of human beings for one another dates: love reconstitutes our former nature, strives to fuse two beings into one, and heals human nature.

Our species can only be happy on one condition: that we fulfill our desire for love, that each of us encounters the being who is our other half, and thus returns to our original nature.

—PLATO, The Symposium

The first draft is never the finished story. It is a sketch of the story, drawn while the writer is still under the influence of the idea. It might capture the energy, but never fully contains it. What feels right in the moment is often only familiar, convenient, but ultimately unfinished.

This is the fallacy: what comes easily must be true…

I have learned that writing a story or novel or screenplay is easy. Getting it to a stage that is endurable is hard.

In reality, the ease is the problem. The first draft flatters the writer. It hides its weaknesses behind the momentum of completion. Critically, it encourages preservation rather than correction.

Good writing begins when the writer stops trusting the glow of the first draft.

To improve a piece, a writer must question why something felt natural. The writer should cut what seemed essential and rewrite what appeared effortless. Kill your darlings, they say. What survives this process is not an original draft, but something more deliberate and more precise.

Take Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Victor succeeds on his first attempt. He assembles the creature, animates it, and in that moment achieves exactly what he set out to do. The experiment worked… but that’s the problem!

Faced with his creation, he recoils and retreats. What seemed brilliant in conception reveals itself, in reality, to be flawed, incomplete and dangerous.

The first draft is like the creature.

It is brought to life quickly, often successfully, but without the necessary care. It reflects the ambition of the writer but not the finished truth of the work.

A finished piece does not resemble its first draft. It exists because the writer was willing to dismantle what they first created and rebuilt it with greater attention.

The real work begins after the first attempt, when the writer accepts that the first version was alive – but wrong.

You might be expecting Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, even Shirley Jackson, all of whom are honourable mentions, but I have strived to give you a list of stories you may not have seen before.

These three stories show that great writing does not depend on what happens, but how it is told.

1. Feathers by Raymond Carver (1981)

This is Carver doing what he does best: making something innocuous feel life changing.

On the surface, nothing really happens. A dinner with a work friend gets awkward, there’s an ugly baby and a peacock. What’s not to love? But the real subject is how your life can slowly drift toward what you want to avoid. The narrator walks into that house thinking he’s different from Bud and Olla, but walks out slightly altered, already drifting toward the same, passive life.

That evening at Bud and Olla’s was special. I knew it was special. That evening I felt good about almost everything in my life. I couldn’t wait to be alone with Fran to talk to her about what I was feeling. I made a wish that evening. Sitting there at the table, I closed my eyes for a minute and thought hard. What I wished for was that I’d never forget or otherwise let go of that evening. That’s one wish of mine that came true…

2. Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff (1995)

This story is among my top 10 favourites of all time. It is about a guy who goes into a bank, only to be caught up in a heist. But instead of cowering underneath the teller’s table, he laughs in the face of the gunman. I would say spoiler alert, but the title has done the heavy lifting for me.

Wolff masterfully weaves distant memory with the urgent present into an incredibly dense and thematic story. He shows how memory rather than action defines a character. Here he presents how an inconspicuous childhood moment can stick in our brains even when a bullet passes through it.

The first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions. Because of their peculiar origin these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory…

3. Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta by Kate Braverman (1990)

Style becomes the subject, and the psychological becomes the story. It is a hallucinatory and deeply narcotic recounting of a woman with drug addiction and her stalker, Lenny. Braverman’s style, which is unstable and frantic at times, makes for an intensely memorable experience.

It is a strange cross between Cheever’s The Swimmer and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas crossed with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

She could remember being a child. It was a child’s game in a child’s afternoon, before time or distance were factors. When you were told you couldn’t move or couldn’t see. And for those moments you are paralyzed or blind. You freeze in place. You don’t move. You feel that you have been there for years. It does not occur to you that you can move. It does not occur to you that you can break the rules. The world is a collection of absolutes and spells. You know words have a power. You are entranced. The world is a soft blue…

Read these stories not just for what happens, but for how they make it happen. That’s where the real lessons are.

Now, do you have any recommendations for me?