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Updated: June 29, 2025
However it may be, both in story and in picture, Icarus and his less conspicuous father have inspired the Caucasian mind, and the world is the richer for them. Of the unsupported myths unsupported, that is, by even a shadow of probability there is no end.
For ever soaring to the sun, he was for ever realizing the fine Grecian fable of Icarus; and the sea of disappointment into which he perpetually fell, with its tumultuous tides and ever-chafing billows, bearing him on from whirlpool to whirlpool, for ever battling and for ever lost.
"Good heavens, one would think I was Icarus, gluing a pair of wax wings on to my shoulder-blades for a flight into ether. I'm not exactly a novice at the game, you know, though I haven't done any snow-climbing. Why, you little donkey, you look pale. What's the matter with you?" "Do you know what happened this morning or rather last night?" the Boy replied to my question with another.
The funeral expenses were unpaid, and Auguste's pupils had been frightened away by the shock of successive disasters and the general atmosphere of wretchedness that pervaded the house. Auguste himself was writing a symphonic poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory of his son.
The wings, it appears, were soldered with wax, and Icarus, flying too high, was struck by a ray of the sun, which melted the wax. The youth fell into the sea, which from him derived its name of Icarian. It is possible that this fable only symbolisms the introduction of sails in navigation.
He was, in short, a Bohemian of the country of brains, adventurous but not an adventurer, a harebrained fellow, a Phaeton running away with the horses of the sun, a kind of Icarus with relays of wings. He had a wonderful facility for getting into scrapes, and an equally wonderful facility for getting out of them again, falling on his feet like a cat.
I did not finish it, because I am not skilled, like the gentleman that used to write political ship-news, in that style which I wanted to perfect my essay: but in the prelude I observed how ignorant the ancients were in supposing Icarus melted the wax of his wings by too near access to the sun, whereas he would have been frozen to death before he made the first post on that road.
While a refugee in Jamaica he wrote: "We are a little human species; we possess a world apart... new in almost all the arts and sciences, and yet old, after a fashion, in the uses of civil society.... Neither Indians nor Europeans, we are a species that lies midway .... Is it conceivable that a people recently freed of its chains can launch itself into the sphere of liberty without shattering its wings, like Icarus, and plunging into the abyss?
Some had declined with a sort of unambitious comfort, some had fallen into the trough of Toryism, and spent their time in holding fast to conventional and established things; one or two had flown like Icarus so near the sun that their waxen wings had failed them; and yet some of us had missed greatness by so little. Was it to be always so? Was it always to be a battle against hopeless odds?
Atmananda did not teach the myth of Icarus. He spoke, instead, about the role of the Self-Sacrificing Hero. "Be like a star," he said at Centre meetings, citing Guru, Gandhi, and Jesus Christ. "Burn your own substance so that others may see." Yet as the months in southern California slipped by, he spoke increasingly about the myth of the Fluid Warrior. "Be fluid," he said.
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