As someone who’s never owned an electric shaver, and uses those single-blade Bic disposable razors – what are they, about 50p for a pack of ten? – I can appreciate this essay in praise of the wet shave, but I’m not sure what Homer’s got to do with it (via ALDaily):
It will sound like madness to say it, but when I have rinsed the lather from my face and splashed it with intensely cold water, when I have patted my face dry with a towel and rubbed in the lotion to protect the newly exfoliated skin, smooth and supple—I have some sense of what Homer meant. On a good day, a good close shave is the Iliad and the Odyssey in one: the mastery of the dangerous blade, the return to the comforts of home. To shave well is to be a man, and to be a man is closer than Homer could ever have imagined to being like in appearance to the immortal gods—as Psalm 8 put it, “a little lower than the angels,” and as Genesis put it, made in the image of God.
Yet just as the Iliad is a very strange sort of poem about war, diffident about heroism even as it celebrates it, so the Odyssey is a very strange poem about homecoming, given how often and in how many ways Odysseus seems to defer his arrival. A modern reader cannot help but be troubled by the year Odysseus spends in the house (and the bed, and the bath) of Circe, and the way he pursues every possible detour, at great cost to his shipmates, on the circuitous path back to Ithaca. Even his return home brings delay after delay, long after the bath where he is recognized by his old nurse for the first time. Odysseus and his tragic counterpart Achilles are our archetypes of manhood, for better and for worse: our capacity for valor but also our tendency toward wounded depression and inward-turning rage; our longing for home, hearth, and bed but also our bent toward wandering and lingering far from home, prolonging our adventures while our wives and children wait for our return.
Every bath, vulnerable and naked, warm and wet, is a return home, but every man is Odysseus, prone to wander. Every shave, leaving our skin as smooth as it was before we became men, before the years crept in, before we were, alas, responsible for our own face, simultaneously restores us and reminds us that something has gone wrong. We are, if we are fortunate, more than we expected, but not quite what we hoped to become.
And sometimes a shave is just a shave.
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