Keep Ithaca always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But don’t hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way … Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out … Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.
C.P. Cavafy
Greek/Egyptian poet
Odysseus took the long way home to Ithaca — a very long way home indeed, 10 years after the Trojan War concluded, a war that lasted 10 years itself and ended only when the wily Odysseus, as he was known, came up with a scheme, the famous and infamous “Trojan Horse.” It turned the tide, but earned him the enmity of Poseidon, god of the sea, who made his trip home a seafarer’s nightmare.
Many who weren’t familiar with Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic poem, “The Odyssey,” are acquainted now, thanks to a new film by Christopher Nolan, the cinematic event of the year to date and a testament to the enduring power of myth.
As it happens, I too have a long history with this story.
Picture a 10-year-old boy holed up in a cozy, second-floor bedroom in one of those grand four-square Gunderson homes overlooking Jackson Boulevard on the south side of Oak Park in the early 1960s, hunched over a book.
The Adventures of Ulysses was one of many books in the Landmark series for young readers. Abe Lincoln – Log Cabin to the White House, The Landing of the Pilgrims, The Swamp Fox of the Revolution to name a few.
But this one changed my life.
The story held me in thrall — Ulysses (the Latin version of Odysseus) and his crew were condemned to a long, tortuous trip back home, during which they encounter the man-eating, one-eyed Cyclops; the boulder-tossing Laestrygonians; the perilous passage between Scylla and Charybdis, the deadly song of the Sirens, Circe’s lotus blossoms of forgetfulness. At one point, he came within sight of his homeland, only to have his crew foolishly open the bag of winds that King Aeolus had given them, setting off a storm that blew them far off course again. He survives it all and is finally delivered to Ithaca’s shore. In the guise of a lowly beggar, he must use his wiles, and his prowess with a bow, to regain his throne and be reunited with his family.
I didn’t know a story could have this kind of impact. Reading it in my bedroom, night after night, the world enlarged and I was launched on a literary odyssey.
I never did read the original, but here’s a taste: “Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure … for already have I suffered full much, and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war. Let this be added to the tale.”
My literary odyssey led me to James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, a modern retelling, and Tennyson’s famous poem of the same name, in which England’s great poet re-imagines an older Odysseus, driven by deep restlessness to set off one more time to seek a newer world.
I am part of all that I have met / Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades / … And this gray spirit yearning in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Oak Park turned out to be my Ithaca. I left it for 20 years and returned to chronicle the odysseys of my fellow villagers for the past 36 years. You really can go home again and Oak Park has been everything I could have asked of Ithaca.
The power in Homer’s metaphor is what makes this ancient story still relevant. Joseph Campbell, the world’s foremost authority on mythology, said stories like these have no power unless we apply them to our own life — until we see our face in them. The “hero of a thousand faces,” he called it. When we see the parallels, the power of myth is unleashed.
Everyone is on a mythic journey through a wild and wonder-filled world, facing monsters — external and internal — driven by a holy restlessness, navigating and probing the wine-dark deep, far from home but getting closer, enduring the great loneliness of the hero, stripped at last of all but our very selves, homing in, coming full circle, returning to our respective Ithacas, thoroughly humbled.
This is why African Americans, that most Odyssean of cultures, refers to the end of our individual odysseys as “homegoing.”
In Nolan’s somewhat Hollywoodized version, Odysseus sets out on one more journey at the end of the film, following the setting sun, to honor the crew he lost. A journey of atonement.
What is your odyssey? What is your Ithaca? What is your atonement?
Only by bidding farewell to longings and attachments, to how much more there is to live for, and know it was all worthwhile yet let it all go.
Only then, when death comes, will we be ready for it.