“Fortune is not a gift from the sky, but a virtue,” says Odysseus in Luigi Malerba’s Ithaca Forever (Itaca per sempre), an extremely Italian fanfic of the Odyssey’s closing act. I couldn’t find this exact sentence in Homer’s original, so I’ll take it as a paraphrasis on Malerba’s part—the sentence does a good job of summarising the ethos of Ithaca’s wayfarer king.
“In Exile”, a short story by Anton Chekhov, explores similar themes, albeit striking a much more bitter and ambiguous tone. How should man deal with his misfortune? Should he struggle against fate, like a desperate chad? Or should he acquiesce to his virginhood?
Chekhov puts the debate in the mouth of two Siberian exiles. Smarty, the stoic of the two, tells us:
[…] it’s only your folly which makes you believe you are the most miserable mortal on earth, but the time will come when you will say: ‘May God grant everyone such a life!’ Just look at me. In a week’s time the water will have fallen, and then we’ll launch the small boat, and I’ll be staying here, rowing back and forth across the river. For twenty years I’ve been doing just that. Day and night! White salmon and pike beneath the water, and I above it! And glory be, I’m not in need of anything. God grant everyone such a life.
And:
It’s all foolishness, brother. The devil is tormenting you, damn his soul. Don’t listen to the accursed one. Don’t surrender to him. If he talks about women, answer him: ‘Don’t want them.’ If he talks about freedom, tell him straightway: ‘Don’t want it.’ You don’t need anything. Neither father, nor mother, nor wife, nor freedom, nor house, nor home. I don’t want anything, damn their souls!
Smarty sure isn’t about to get trapped in the eternal hamster wheel of Samsara. The rebuttal is delivered in broken Russian (English) by a Tartar in exile:
[…] you are carcass… God created man to be alive, to be happy and sad and full of sorrow, but you… you want nothing. You not alive, you stone, you lump of clay! Stone want nothing, and you want nothing. You are stone, and God does not love you.”
Chekhov’s story, as always, gives no facile answers.