that led to the building where the class met, a brick box as studiedly inoffensive as a Marriott, or up the little walkway to the steep-gabled house at the edge of campus that for a few days each week was my home. To avoid having to make the three-hour trip twice in one day, he would often spend the night in that house, sleeping in the extra bedroom that serves as my study, stretched out on a narrow daybed that had been my childhood bed—a low wooden bed that my father built for me with his own hands when I was old enough to leave my crib. Now there was something about this bed that only my father and I knew: it was made out of a door, a cheap hollow door to which he’d screwed four sturdy wooden legs, securing them with metal brackets that are as solidly attached today as they were fifty years ago when he first joined the steel to the wood. This bed, with its amusing little secret, unknowable unless you hauled off the mattress and saw the paneled door beneath, was the bed on which my father would sleep that spring semester of the Odyssey seminar, not long before he became ill and my brothers and sister and I had to start fathering my father, anxiously watching him as he slept fitfully in a series of enormous, elaborately mechanized contraptions that hardly seemed like beds at all, whirring noisily as they inclined and declined, like cranes. But that came later.
It used to amuse my father that for a long time I divided my time among so many different places: this house on the rural campus; the mellow old home in New Jersey where my boys and their mother lived and where I would spend long weekends; my apartment in New York City, which, as time passed and my life expanded, first to include a family and then to teach, had become little more than a pit stop between train trips. You’re always on the road, my father would sometimes say at the end of a phone conversation, and as he said the word “road” I could picture him shaking his head from side to side in gentle bewilderment. For nearly all of his life my father lived in one house: the one he moved into a month before I was born, and which he left for the last time one January day in 2012, a year to the day after he started my class on the Odyssey.
The Odyssey course ran from late January to early May. A week or so after it ended, I happened to be on the phone with my friend Froma, a Classics scholar who had been my mentor in graduate school and had lately enjoyed hearing my periodic reports about Daddy’s progress over the course of the Odyssey seminar. At some point in the conversation she mentioned a Mediterranean cruise that she’d taken a couple of years before, called “Retracing the Odyssey.” You should do it! Froma exclaimed. After this semester, after teaching the Odyssey to your father, how could you not go? Not everyone agreed: when I e-mailed a travel agent friend of mine, a brisk blond Ukrainian called Yelena, to ask her what she thought, her response came back within a minute: “AVOID THEME CRUISES AT ALL COSTS!” But Froma had been my teacher, and I was still in the habit of obeying her. The next morning, when I called my father and told him about my conversation with her, he made a noncommittal noise and said, Let’s see.
We went online to look at the cruise line’s website. As I slumped on the sofa in my apartment in New York, a little worn out by another week of traveling up and down Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, staring at my laptop, I could picture him sitting in the crowded home office that had once been the bedroom I shared with my older brother, Andrew: the simple low beds that he’d built and the plain oak desk long since replaced by particle-board desks from Staples whose slick black surfaces were already bowed by the weight of the computer equipment on top, the desktops and monitors and laptops and printers and scanners, the looping cables and swags of cords and winking lights giving it all the air of a hospital room. The cruise, we read, would follow the mythic hero’s convoluted, decade-long itinerary as he made his way home from the Trojan War, plagued by shipwrecks and monsters. It would begin at Troy, the site of which is located in what is now Turkey, and end on Itháki, a small island in the western Greek sea that purports to be Ithaca, the place Odysseus called home. “Retracing the Odyssey” was an “educational” cruise, and although he was contemptuous of anything that struck him as a needless luxury—cruises and sightseeing and vacations—my father was a great believer in education. And so a few weeks later, in June, fresh from our recent immersion in the text of the Homeric epic, we took the cruise, which lasted ten days in all, one day for each year of Odysseus’ long journey home.
During our voyage we saw nearly everything we’d hoped to see, the strange new landscapes and the debris of the various civilizations that had occupied them. We saw Troy, which to our untrained eye looked like nothing so much as a sand castle that’s been kicked in by a malicious child, its legendary heights reduced by now to a random agglomeration of columns and huge stones blindly facing the sea below. We saw the Neolithic monoliths on the island of Gozo, off Malta, where there is also a cave that is said to have been the home of Calypso, the beautiful nymph on whose island Odysseus was stranded for seven years during his travels, and who offered him immortality if only he would forsake his wife for her, but he refused. We saw the elegantly severe columns of a Doric temple left unfinished, for reasons impossible to know, by some Greeks of the classical era in Segesta, on Sicily—the island where, toward the end of their homeward voyage, Odysseus’ crew ate the forbidden meat of the cattle that belong to the sun god Hyperion, a sin for which they all died. We visited the desolate spot on the Campanian coast near Naples that, the ancients believed, was the entrance to Hades, the Land of the Dead—that being another, unexpected stop on Odysseus’ journey toward home, but perhaps not so unexpected because, after all, we must settle our accounts with the dead before we can get on with our living. We saw fat Venetian forts, squatting on parched Peloponnesian meadows like frogs on a heath after a fire, near Pílos in southern Greece, Homer’s Pylos, a town where, according to the poet, a kindly if somewhat long-winded old king named Nestor is said to have reigned and where he once entertained the young son of Odysseus, who had come there in search of information about his long-lost father: which is how the Odyssey begins, a son gone in search of an absent parent. And of course we saw the sea, too, with its many faces, glass smooth and stone rough, at certain times blithely open and at others tightly inscrutable, sometimes of a weak blue so clear that you could see straight down to the sea urchins at the bottom, as spiked and expectant as mines left over from some war whose causes and combatants no one any longer remembers, and sometimes of an impenetrable purple that is the color of the wine that we refer to as red but the Greeks call black.
We saw all those things during our travels, all those places, and learned a great deal about the peoples who had lived there. My father, in whom a crabbed cautiousness about the dangers of going pretty much anywhere had given rise to certain notorious sayings that his five children loved to mock (the most dangerous place in the world is a parking lot, people drive like maniacs!), came to relish his stint as a Mediterranean tourist. But in the end, as the result of a string of irritating events beyond the control of the captain or his crew, which I will describe presently, we were unable to make the last stop on the itinerary. And so we never saw Ithaca, the place to which Odysseus strove so famously to return; never reached what may be the best-known destination in literature. But then, the Odyssey itself, filled as it is with sudden mishaps and surprising detours, schools its hero in disappointment, and teaches its audience to expect the unexpected. For this reason, our not reaching Ithaca may have been the most Odyssean aspect of our educational cruise.
Expect the unexpected. Late in the autumn that same year, a few months after my father and I returned home from our trip—which, I would sometimes joke with Daddy, because we had never reached our goal, could still be considered to be incomplete, could be thought of as ongoing—my father fell.
There is a term that comes up when you study ancient Greek literature, occurring equally in both imaginative and historical works, used to describe the remote origins of some disaster: arkhê kakôn, “the beginning of the bad things.” Most often the “bad things” in question are wars. The historian Herodotus, for instance, trying to determine the cause of a great war between the Greeks and the Persians that took place in the 480s B.C., says that a decision taken by the Athenians to send ships to some allies many years before the actual opening of hostilities was the arkhê kakôn of that conflict. (Herodotus was writing in the late 400s B.C., approximately three and a half centuries after Homer composed his poems about the Trojan War—which, according
