No One Returns Unchanged

Profound experiences alter us permanently, and many people quietly struggle with the gap between:

who they were before,

and who exists afterward.

Ma: Between Sounds
Exploring the quiet spaces between thought, story, and modern life.

More soon.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Welcome back.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Thank you for joining us again here on this journey of the between the sounds.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

I wanted to start this with a story about a story.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

I was sitting in a waiting room, and I happened to be reading the new edition of The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. And as I was in this waiting room, the lights were heavy, the TV was on, and another war was being spoken about.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

At that point in time, I was focused on reading and reflection.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

But there are also stories that survive because we keep finding ourselves inside them.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Humanity and the Odyssey is one of those stories.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

And this time, because of Emily Wilson, it's not about the monsters, it's not because of the wars. It's not even because of the journey. It's because somewhere deep beneath the language and history and distance of times, it understands something about being human that never really changes.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

And what struck me was that it didn't feel ancient. It was how modern the loneliness felt. We often speak about Odysseus as a hero. And we do that a lot in these ancient poems.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

We look at him as a strategist, a survivor. But what about him being a man trying to return home? And that's something that Emily Wilson has done for us. That the myth became human again. And we have people who are shaped and reshaped by war until even our home no longer fully recognizes us. And maybe that's why the story still matters. Because most of us, in one way or another, know what it means to be changed by the journey.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

It's not necessarily oceans or battlefields.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

But illness, loss, work, time, parenthood, disappointment, silence.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

There are versions of ourselves that leave home and versions that return unable to fit back inside the life that we once knew.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

So I think that our idea of survival never it changes us, but it never changes. We are still in that mode of survival.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

We still are, but it still changes us, and it's still there. And what's happened beautifully again in literature is that we have been removed of the distance between the past and us.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

So right now, this version, it breathes, and it reminds us that stories were once spoken aloud, and that's how they remained. That's how we still have stories. We all know this. But it's what we do to our children. We do for our children, hopefully. We tell them stories, and it doesn't always have to come from a book. Sometimes it's just a story that a family tells over and over again. And I'm reading another book, and it's The Secret Society of Librarians, and it's about how literature saved people who lived in the ghettos during World War II. And then I realized here I am in a waiting room, reading the Odyssey, listening to about another war on TV, and I'm also reading about how literature helped people in the ghettos of another war. Some call it the war, World War II, but it is a war of many wars around the world, and we are all somehow affected by it. But right now, if we took the time to let literature become a place where we have Ma, where we have the separation between sound, and we let that envelope us, which is what happened to me during this situation where I've got two books and I've got the TV on, and then all of a sudden I'm not there, I'm between them, and I'm thinking how they come together, and how human it is that in the thousands of years since some of these poems have been written, however, they've been written, however, you read them, we still have another book that is talking about less than a hundred years ago, in the same manner, using storytelling and giving us that space in between to think about the world in which we live and the way that we fit in the world in which we live, and sometimes how we don't always fit where we used to, but that's okay because the space between sound has given us the ability to believe in being something different, and that's what mud will do for us, and that's what literature does for us. So it's like it's like a resurrection inside of us, it's an epiphany inside of us, it's a belief inside of us, it's inside of us, it's a part of us, but it's yet so humane, it's so common. It is what makes all of us common to each other. Between the sound makes us realize who we are, how we've changed, where we fit, and then we realize we still build wars, we still worship conquests, we still make noise for wisdom, we still send people out who may never find their way home again, but psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, even if we're wondering, even if we're wandering, even if that's what is happening to Odysseus, even if that's what's happening to the women in the secret society of librarians, again, we've got that space, and that space has now given us people who have survived to tell us the story, and that story still gives us the space between the sound.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

So after everything we survive, do we ever truly return home? Or do we simply learn to live to be beside the person who left?

SPEAKER_00 11:48

And that's between. We live between the person who left home and is now someone else. We sit beside them, we don't lose them, they're still between us, it's between the sound, and so my question is: what if the hardest part of life is not surviving our journey, but learning how to return afterwards? Or after enough change, what does home mean anymore?

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Think on that. Let that be between your sounds. Who are we supposed to become after the vision of us that left and never fully comes back? It happens to a lot of people. Let's think on that.