Sailing to Ithaca

Father and son:
Odysseus and Telemachus

Always keep Ithaca in your mind;
to reach her is your destiny.
But do not rush your journey in the least.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
--C. P. Cavafy* (1863-1933)

The second of Homer's two great epics is, of course, the Odyssey -- the story of how the hero Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) struggles to return to his island of Ithaca after the conclusion of the Trojan War. 

Because Odysseus gets on the bad side of Poseidon, it takes him ten years to return, losing all of his warriors during the process.  His son Telemachus, an infant when Odysseus left for battle, is now an adult seeking to learn if his father is still alive, or dead.  "Suitors" have descended on Ithaca, seeking the hand of Penelope -- Odysseus's wife -- and essentially being terrible guests.  Telemachus -- Odysseus's heir -- doesn't know how to handle the insult the Suitors pose to Penelope, to Odysseus, and to Ithaca.

One theme of the Odyssey is (or may be) the relationship between father and son -- a son who feels inadequate and inexperienced compared with his heroic father, a father he never had a chance to know.  The son seeks his father, and the father looks forward to seeing the son he last saw as an infant.

Daniel Mendelsohn is a professor of humanities at Bard College in New York, where he specializes in Greek studies.  He has written a memoir of his experiences teaching a one-term seminar on the Odyssey, meeting with a small group of freshman students once a week for two hours around a seminar table.  His book, The Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, is a week by week, chapter by chapter, study of the Odyssey by an expert in classical Greek and of Greek literature. 

But because the author's own 81-year-old father asked to audit the seminar -- and ended up participating at length and with strong opinions in class discussions -- it is also a memoir of a father's relationship to his son -- an often fraught relationship in this case, between a stern, impatient parent and a son who had always felt inadequate and unloved.

The two themes mesh amazingly well in Mendelsohn's book -- Telemachus's search for his father, their eventual meeting, their learning to appreciate each other, and an analogous development in the relationship between Mendelsohn and his own father.

The Odyssey is full of stories, many of which are known by many children -- the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, etc. -- but the epic itself is complex in its development.  As Mendelsohn points out, it is written as story-tellers often tell stories -- with long digressions to other periods of time to explain the event that was originally being described.  Mendelsohn adopts an identical "circular" approach to his own memoir -- a mention of something his father has said, for example, may lead to a long digressive recounting of events decades earlier that explain the father's comment. 

These digressions are neither frustrating nor unpleasant.  They seem very natural, as did the digressions in Homer's epic to his own listeners.  After all, we have a full book to discuss the 24 "books" of the Odyssey.  There's no rush to hurry to the end, anymore than ancient Greeks were in any hurry to "get to the end" of an epic.  We can wander leisurely through the Odyssey, through Mendelsohn's recounting of how he taught the semester seminar and of his discussions with his students, and through the gradual revelation of the history of tensions between the Mendelsohns, father and son.

This is a wonderful book, and a painless way not only to learn the "plot" of the Odyssey, but to experience a classical expert's analysis and interpretation of the many themes in the epic that might well pass over the head of the casual reader. 

Mendelsohn also, obviously, loves the Greek language, and he repeatedly explains how a Greek term was used in the Greek original of the epic, and how English words have derived from the original Greek.  In the very first chapter he identifies the term arkhe kakon -- the "beginning of bad things" -- as describing how Helen of Troy's abduction initiated the entire Trojan tragedy.  We should know the words, he suggests -- from arkhe, we get the "arche-" words like archetype; from kakon, we get cacophony.

If etymology isn't your idea of cool (it is mine!), that's ok.  The etymological passages are frequent, but brief.  Feel free to read right past them!

The book ends, after the seminar concludes and after the author and his father go on an "Odyssey Cruise" in the Mediterranean, with the death shortly thereafter of Mendelsohn Senior.  The son's account of his last days with his father, and of the increased understanding and appreciation they had developed for each other's very different characters, is intensely moving, one of the most moving descriptions of a father's death I've ever read.

A man -- track his tale for me, Muse, the twisty one who
wandered widely, once he'd sacked Troy's holy citadel;
he saw the cities of many men and knew their minds.

Estimated reading time is six hours.  This book is well worth the investment of six hours.
----------------------------
* "Ithaca," translated from Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn.