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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Mendelsohn
Cover illustration © Ael / Alamy Stock Photo
Daniel Mendelsohn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007545124
Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780007545148
Version: 2018-05-03
For my mother
Contents
For the purposes of narrative coherence and in consideration of the privacy of the students in my Odyssey seminar and the passengers aboard the “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, names have been changed and a number of details relating to events and characters have been modified.
All translations from Greek and Latin are my own.
(Invocation)
1964–2011
The plot of the Odyssey is not long in the telling. A man has been away from home for many years; Poseidon is always on the watch for him; he is all alone. As for the situation at home, his goods are being laid waste by the Suitors, who plot against his son. After a storm-tossed journey, he returns home, where he reveals himself, destroys his enemies, and is saved.
—ARISTOTLE, Poetics
One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired research scientist who was then aged eighty-one, asked me, for reasons I thought I understood at the time, if he might sit in on the course, and I said yes. Once a week for the next sixteen weeks he would make the trip between the house in the Long Island suburbs where I grew up, a modest split-level in which he still lived with my mother, to the riverside campus of the small college where I teach, which is called Bard. At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen who were enrolled in the course, seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home.
It was deep winter when that term began, and when my father wasn’t trying to persuade me that the poem’s hero, Odysseus, wasn’t in fact a “real” hero (because, he would say, he’s a liar and he cheated on his wife!), he was worrying a great deal about the weather: the snow on the windshield, the sleet on the roads, the ice on the walkways. He was afraid of falling, he said, his vowels still marked by his Bronx childhood: fawling. Because of his
