Final Paper Extension

Hermes drew a deep breath, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow as he stepped onto the elevator of the Olympian Mountain Apartment Complex. ‘Embodiment of extreme mobility and I still don’t take the stairs,’ he mused to himself, shaking his head with a weary grin. There was a time when Hermes’ messenger service primarily served his father Zeus, but recent earthly advancements in communication had made the demand for his work skyrocket. As a result, Zeus commanded that Hermes open his own business, Divine Delivery, and the poor messenger’s days grew increasingly longer. His social life had especially suffered this past century, ever since the invention of the telephone. Now instead of zipping to and fro between the mortal world and his father’s celestial abode, Hermes existed almost entirely in the filthy human realm, only returning to the heavens with enough strength and time to collapse into bed.
As the lift rose, Hermes mused to himself about the good ol’ days, working for his old man. Sure, Zeus could be a bit of a tyrant sometimes, but even the demands of the king of the gods couldn’t compete with the high-tech thirst of millions of people worldwide. Humans had an insatiable need for immediacy that even the quickest deity couldn’t comprehend.
The lift pushed through the clouds and came to a stop at Hermes’ loft, where he kicked off his winged Birkenstocks and poured a glass of wine before glancing at his furiously blinking answering machine. Each night, Hermes returned to thousands of messages listing customer complaints, from dropped calls to letters that arrived past their past their promised delivery date. Rolling his eyes, the exhausted messenger took a long sip from his glass, mentally thanking his brother Dionysus, and pressed “play.” Surprisingly, it was not an automated recording about a misdelivered package, but his father’s voice that came on the machine.
“Come on up when you get this, son,” Zeus boomed, rattling the little box that still flashed its blinking red alert. “I have a job for you.”
Hermes’ jaw dropped, his mouth as wide and gaping as the gates of Hades. Another job? He could barely handle Divine Delivery! Besides, how many times was he going to have to tell his dad that he had been too old for chores since he turned 2,000?
“It never ends,” Hermes griped to himself as he stepped back into the elevator and rode it all the way up. The doors swept open to the top floor of Olympian Mountain Apartments, where the king of the gods sat awaiting his son’s arrival. Zeus beckoned for Hermes to take a seat.
“I know you’ve been tired,” he began, hesitating for a moment at the sight of his son’s pained expression. “But it hasn’t been enough. The people’s demand for rapid communication exceeds the present capacity of your services, Hermes. I need you to find something more, something better.”
“But Dad,” the messenger protested, “I’m already working around the clock. They have express package delivery, instant telephone connections - what more could they want?”
Zeus sighed, rubbing his temples. “Son, we both know this can only end up a mess. Humans are foolish! They prove this to us time and again. Although they do have some attractive ladies down there...” Zeus trailed off in wistful thought until Hermes’ disgusted expression snapped him out of his lurid daydream.
“Anyway,” he continued, “it is their desire, and we must let them discover this truth on their own. Otherwise, they’ll never learn.”
Tired and dejected, Hermes returned to his apartment and brewed a pot of extra-strength espresso – he knew he wouldn’t be catching a wink tonight. He labored over his new project all night, stopping now and then to grumble about the unappeasable mortals. What improvement could he make that they would actually satisfy them? Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, it came to him. As Helios awoke and the sun rose, Hermes put the final touches on his creation: a worldwide connection of networks. He called it the internet.
The people of the world were overjoyed. Now, an even quicker and more accessible method of communication allowed them to instantly send messages to one another without any form of real human contact. It seemed perfect. Hermes was as busy as ever, but at least they had stopped their complaining for the moment.
Soon, however, the online correspondence that Hermes had provided wasn’t enough. The mortals wanted something even quicker than the electronic mail, or “e-mail” they had been using. After another sleepless night, the messenger god presented them with instant messaging, or “IM,” as the people called it. In order to expedite their messages, humans had created a system of abbreviations, shortening even the briefest of phrases.
Hermes dragged himself into Olympian Mountain after yet another frenzied day. As he struggled against his leaden eyelids, he rued the day he created this “IM.”
“Sure I’m in the best shape of my life,” he groaned, “but I never want to hear the word ‘LOL’ again! What am I saying?! It’s not even a word!” Disgusted, Hermes stalked into the kitchen, only to be greeted with empty cupboards. Not surprisingly, Hermes hadn’t even had time to stop at the agora today. He sighed as his stomach grumbled, a glaring reminder of the colossal appetite he worked up dashing around all day.
Hermes spent most of his time at work longing for his favorite phrase: “BRB.” Hermes loved when humans would “be right back”; it was his only chance to catch his breath and slap a Band-Aid on the blisters left by his now well-worn Birkenstocks. On this particular evening, as Hermes settled down on the couch and pulled off his sandals, one of the wings tore clean off, leaving just a regular, plain, tattered shoe in Hermes’ hand. The messenger was beyond indignant; now the very symbol of his daily labor was destroyed. Something had to be done.
A barefoot Hermes stormed back onto the elevator and once again rode it all the way up. Zeus glanced up in surprise as the messenger huffily exited the lift and announced his presence.
“I’ve had enough, Dad!!”
The king of the gods eyed his disheveled, shoeless son. With a heavy sigh, he set down his copy of The Olympian Gazette.
“I’m listening.”
“I can’t do it anymore, I can’t!” Hermes cried, the ire in his voice gradually becoming more like a whimper. “I’m tired, and my feet have blisters. And the wings fell off my shoes!”
Hermes slumped down on the seat next to his father, feeling like a little 500 year old again. He curled into the fetal position as Zeus rubbed his back in sympathy.
“There, there son,” Zeus soothed. “Yes, yes, I know it’s hard. But you’re a grown god now and that’s why you can handle this. In time, their lesson will be learned. You’ll see. The people will get what they deserve.”
Hermes knew his father was right, so he gritted his teeth and went back to work with one duct-taped sandal. At first, Hermes saw no punishment inflicted on these cretins who were causing him so much grief. As time went on, however, the people of the world became more and more withdrawn, spending days at a time hovering over their keyboards, typing furiously to the friends that they had once spoken to in person. Outdoor games of pickup basketball became online tournaments with virtual spectators cheering on digital athletes. Zeus’ prophecy was correct: communication had rendered the people of the world isolated.

Averno response

Most of Gluck’s piece seems to be set in a contemporary time period – she references modern things such as electric chairs (yikes!). However, in her narration about Persephone, the time period is left ambiguous. The tone of the piece is a little bit dark, especially due to the death-related content, but at the same time it is very contemplative. The narrator has a very reflective voice and is observant about the world around her. She seems to value her time to think, especially when surrounded by nature: “When I was a child, I suffered from insomnia. Summer nights, my parents permitted me to sit by the lake; I took the dog for company” (23). The Persephone narrator conveys more disdain for the earth than I would have pictured – “everything in nature is in some way her relative. I am never alone, she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer” (50). The last line on page 16 reads “a character in Hawthorne,” which I assume refers to the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, although I don’t know specifically what character. I didn’t really feel like I found a passage that I would describe as “second guessing.” The author does describe things in a variety of different ways, but I felt it seemed more like an elaboration, a method of representing a train of thought, which is what a lot of the piece seemed like to me. The difference between the two sections seems to be about the general theme of each – the first section discusses more sexual and relationship things, while the second sections turns more towards the idea of death. This is represented in the Persephone the Wanderer sections. In the first, Gluck writes “Persephone is having sex in hell,” while in the second, she opens with “In the second version, Persephone is dead. She dies, her mother grieves- problems of sexuality need not trouble us here.” After reading Gluck’s interpretation, it definitely made me rethink the idealized aspects of the myth: perhaps Persephone wasn’t so pure and enchanted only by nature; maybe the horrible fate of being taken from her mother was more like freedom than imprisonment. The questions that Gluck poses in her description of Persephone (“Is she at home nowhere?”) are thought provoking in making you question a widely accepted belief, both about the myth of Persephone as well as other things that you just accept as truth.