Slow Havamal: 47

[kylec]

In the 47th verse, Odin tells us how he walked alone when he was young, and became lost along the way. But he felt rich when he crossed paths with a fellow traveler, because “people’s joy is in other people.”

I like to be alone. That may come as a surprise—usually people who engage in protracted exegeses of Old Norse texts on dark corners of the internet have a reputation as incorrigible extroverts—but it’s true. Odin suggests that this is common in youth. While youth isn’t something I’m guilty of, it seems like he means “inexperience.” A young traveler thinks he knows the way. He’s too eager and confident to imagine any other outcome than arriving at his wildest dreams. When we go alone, we don’t have to share the glory. More importantly, we don’t have to take flack from anyone, because a young wanderer is bound to earn it.

Being alone, I can enjoy as much approval and encouragement as I care to give. If it seems like a good idea to turn left, then right be damned. The directions left and right offer a useful metaphor, because it’s nearly impossible to define one without reference to the other. Many otherwise capable people mix them up all the time. The actual direction that a left turn leads depends entirely on which way I’m facing. My left can be your right, and it can also be north, south, east, or west. I suppose we could get technical and say “from the midline of the spine toward the liver, or toward the heart,” to remove the need for mutual reinforcement, though I’m not sure we sense our organs in any way meaningful to practical orientation. And there’s still the changing referent of the person whose rights and lefts we consider.

The point is that in navigation, I need two places. Specifically, I need to know where I am, and where some other point is in reference to me. If I know where I am, but not where anything else is, I’m stranded. To go any direction is no better than a wild guess. If I know where home is, but not where I am or how my home relates to me, I’m lost. The same is true is I know home and how to get from there to Kansas City, but have no clue where I am with regards to either. I need myself, and an external reference to do anything but stumble with the whims of luck and fate.

When we go through life only believing the things we already know, rehashing the same opinions, and affirming every action with some twist of imagination that places it squarely within our daydreams, pretty soon the evidence of our senses will fail to correspond with our mental notions so badly that we will admit we’re lost, or deny it and go insane. This is the first destination of the youth. At that point, I can admit I erred, and search for something outside myself to test my notions against.

The sight of another traveler, Odin admits, made him feel rich. A lost hiker would feel the same way encountering someone who could give them food, water, and the way to the trailhead. In the non-literal sense, another person means an entirely different way of looking at the world that will conflict with my own at many junctures. We may take our turns being informed and lost, but by cross-referencing, we can narrow the location of a truth within our vesica piscis. What another person provides is limits. My wildest notions break on that shore. By living in relation, neither of us will stray as far from our intended path. Wisdom, I’ve argued, is something like “context”: a constellation of experiences and their relationships that maps out future action. It isn’t shared in the way knowledge is, by repeating some aphorism, for example. A person is the living expression of their wisdom, great or small. They provide something solid against which to measure my own notions—another set of landmarks that fill in some of the gaps on my map. The joy of other people is that they give us a glimmer of an unknown self, even as we do the same for them.

There are lots of good reasons to avoid contact with people. But I need to be honest in each moment where I feel the magnetic push of north against north. Is this person really tiresome, or do I fear setting aside the folly of youth by giving up those parts of myself that leave me disoriented to the world in a pleasant daze, in exchange for something outside myself that will serve as a beacon in my travels, even if it reveals that I find myself in rough country.