I often ask the students in my business-writing class to write letters of application for potential jobs. Their favorite word is “passion.”
However, writing about a “passion” for accounting, education, or anything we feel strongly about seems disingenuous. We must demonstrate our passions in our actions. As the old writing dictum goes, “Show. Don’t tell.”
For me, the true meaning of passion sits low in the east just after dark right now.
The constellation Lyra looks like a nearly perfect parallelogram of four stars hanging from Vega, the brightest star of summer.
Lyra is the lyre of Apollo, who regularly rode along with the charioteer Helios as he carried the sun across the sky. The daily traverse was hot and sweaty, even for a deity, and boring. So Apollo entertained himself by strumming his lyre, a kind of hand-held harp.
The lyre is among the most ancient of stringed musical instruments. The Egyptians and Sumerians had them thousands of years before the birth of Christ.
Poets plucked or bowed the lyre, usually as an accompaniment to the singing of songs and the telling of tales. What we call lyric poetry began as songs that told the stories of great heroes as the teller played upon his lyre.
The ancient Greeks believed that the lyre was a god-given gift. Hermes (Mercury to the Romans) created it from a tortoise shell, to which he attached seven strings, the same as the number of stars in the Pleiades star cluster.
Hermes gave the lyre to Apollo, the god of wisdom and the arts. He then gave it to Orpheus because of his great skill as a musician.
Orpheus’s music was so splendid that it could subdue the stark forces of nature. As Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII,
“Everything that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads and then lay by.”
His story embodies authentic passion — heart-rending art, great sacrifice, and perfect love.
Orpheus was deeply in love with Eurydice, and she with him. But Eurydice was bitten by a serpent and died. Orpheus’s love drove him to go to the Underworld and rescue her. Through the glorious power of his art, he sang his way past the ravenous three-headed dog, Cerberus, guardian of the gates to the Underworld.
Orpheus sang of his love for Eurydice to Hades, the god of the Underworld. His melancholy song melted the stone-cold heart of the god of death.
Hades allowed Eurydice to leave death’s realm, but only if Orpheus did not look back on his beloved as they climbed from the Underworld to Earth’s surface.
But Orpheus’s passion was too strong. Inches from salvation, he looked back at Eurydice. She was dragged screaming back to Hades.
Afterward, Orpheus wandered in a daze, singing his plaintive song of love. The local women who heard him were moved to passion themselves. However, Orpheus spurned them, and in a rage, they killed him.
Passion, it seems, has a darker side. In Orpheus, it spurred high art. But uncontrolled by reason, it can destroy the object of its love.
We see the lyre, not Orpheus, in the sky because the gods so loved Orpheus that they sent him to the Underworld to be with his beloved. His lyre, the medium and symbol of his art, they put in the night sky.
They put it there to remind us of the true meaning of passion — that deeply felt love can triumph even over death, and that art and music can perfectly express what is best about the human spirit.
To those of you who espouse your passion, I offer this question. Would you descend into hell and face the lord of the Underworld in its pursuit?
I know I would not, as Orpheus did, give my life for my passion. The best that most of us can do is to give our lives to it. Show. Don’t tell.
Perhaps someday, you will find your true passion in the arts, in a child’s first smile, in service to others, or in the ardent gaze of your beloved. Perhaps you already have.
Or perhaps you will find it, as I did, in a perfect parallelogram laid out among the stars.
Tom Burns is the former director of the Perkins Observatory in Delaware.
