the most influential stories in the history of literature. It is no casual choice. After spending years exploring time, memory, and identity in films like Memento, Inception, and Interstellar, Nolan now takes on Homer's poem, a work that, more than being about heroes and monsters, is about how we make sense of our own existence. When we think of The Odyssey, we usually remember Polyphemus, the Sirens, Circe, or the descent into Hades. Yet Homer's greatest achievement lies not in those episodes, but in the way he tells them. The poem does not begin with Ulysses' departure from Troy. It begins ten years later. The hero is absent. Ithaca has been left in the hands of the suitors, and his son Telemachus sets out in search of news about his father. Only later do we find Odysseus, now a castaway taken in by the Phaeacians. At a banquet he hears the Trojan War being sung and bursts into tears. He is hearing his own story told by someone else. And then Homer makes one of the most brilliant moves in all of literature: he hands the floor to the protagonist. It is Odysseus himself who reconstructs his journey. All the characters appear as memories, not as present events. The hero recovers his identity by ordering his past and turning it into a story. Curiously, that is exactly what we do when a game of Go ends. While we play, we live trapped in the present. We calculate variations, defend a group, search for the next move. We do not yet know how important each decision will turn out to be. But when the game ends and we open the kifu, everything changes. Suddenly, a stone placed in the opening explains a fight that took place a hundred moves later. A small concession turns out to have been the condition for building a large territory. A move that seemed insignificant is revealed to be the true turning point of the entire game. The kifu turns a sequence of moves into a story. And the player stops being only a player and becomes a narrator as well. We don't review a game just to find mistakes. We review it to understand who we were when we made them. We discover what we saw, what we didn't see, what frightened us, and what made us overconfident. Every game is, in a way, an autobiography written in stones. That is why great masters devote so much time to post-game analysis. They know that understanding comes not only from calculation, but from the ability to reconstruct the meaning of what was lived. Homer's monsters, too, appear again and again on the board. Polyphemus represents pride. Odysseus has already escaped the Cyclops when he decides to reveal his name. He needs to prove who the victor was. That moment of vanity brings down Poseidon's pursuit and prolongs his journey by years. In Go it happens often. We win one fight and want to win the next one as well. We captured a group and kept attacking when all we needed to do was consolidate our lead. Many games are lost not because of a reading mistake, but because of the inability to stop in time. The Sirens symbolize another temptation well known to any player. They don't win by force. They win by diverting your attention. They promise something irresistible. There are sirens in Go, too: a brilliant invasion, a spectacular combination, a capture that seems decisive. While we chase that opportunity, we stop listening to the position. We lose sight of the global balance of the board. The strong player, like Odysseus tied to the mast, knows how to resist the seduction of the brilliant move when he understands that it does not serve the objective of the game. Scylla and Charybdis represent another essential lesson. There are positions in which no perfect move exists. We can only choose which of the the two losses will be smaller. Maturity in Go does not consist of always finding the ideal solution, but of accepting that some concessions are inevitable. And perhaps the descent into Hades recalls those games we know are lost, but keep playing because they can still teach us something. Sometimes a defeat analyzed honestly is worth more than ten forgotten victories. Yet the true meaning of The Odyssey appears at the end. Ulysses returns to Ithaca, but no one recognizes him. He must disguise himself as a beggar, reunite with Telemachus, string the bow that only he can handle, and slowly reclaim the place that belongs to him. The return does not consist simply of coming back. It consists of showing that the journey has transformed us. The same thing happens with Go. After a tournament, a long break, or a painful defeat, we return to the board believing we are going back to the same place. But it is never so. Every game has changed us. We have learned to look at things differently, to weigh other priorities, to distrust certain temptations, and to accept that not everything can be won. Perhaps that is why the analogy between The Odyssey and Go feels so natural. Both speak of time. Both speak of memory. Both teach us that true learning does not happen during the action, but when we are able to look back and understand the path we have traveled. We believe that Go is about placing stones and that The Odyssey is about defeating monsters. In reality, both speak to us of something much deeper: how we construct the story of our lives. Because no one understands a game while they are playing it. And no one understands a life while they are living it. Only at the end can we go back through the kifu and discover that some small decision, seemingly insignificant, changed everything that came after. Perhaps that is the true lesson Homer continues to offer us nearly three thousand years later. Not that there are heroes capable of defeating monsters, but that we all need to learn to read the kifu of our own existence to discover that Ithaca was never just a place to return to. It was, above all, the person the journey was meant to make us. Published in La Esquina #011 (November 2026). Download the full magazine as a PDF
