thought she was listening for Thomas, but she was thinking. It’s funny, she said slowly, that you ended up doing just what your father did.
For this reason—because the men in that family didn’t talk much to others, didn’t share their feelings and dramas the way my mother’s relatives did—it seemed strange to me that one day we had to rush down to Florida to be with Poppy, my small, silent grandfather. Only gradually did I perceive the reasons for Nanny’s frantic phone call: he was gravely ill. So we went to the airport and got on a plane and then spent a week or so in Florida in the hospital room, waiting, I supposed, for him to die. The hospital bed was screened by a curtain with a pattern of pink and green fish, and the thought that Poppy had to be hidden filled me with terror. I dared not look beyond it. Instead, I sat on an orange plastic chair and I read, or played with my toys. I have no memory of what my father did during all those days at the hospital. Even when his father was well, I knew, they didn’t talk much; the point, I somehow understood, was that Daddy was there, that he had come. Your father is your father, he told me a decade later when Poppy was really dying, this time in a hospital near our house on Long Island. Many of my father’s pronouncements took this x is x form, always with the implication that to think otherwise, to admit that x could be anything other than x, was to abandon the strict codes that governed his thinking and held the world in place: Excellence is excellence, period; or Smart is smart, there’s no such thing as being a “bad test taker.” Your father is your father. Every day during Poppy’s quiet final decline in the summer of 1975, my father would drive to this hospital on his lunch break, a drive of fifteen minutes or so, and sit eating a sandwich in silence next to the high bed on which his father lay, seeming to grow smaller each day, as desiccated and immobile as a mummy, oblivious, dreaming perhaps of his dead wife and many dead siblings. Your father is your father, Daddy replied when I was fifteen and asked him why, if his father didn’t even know he was there, he kept coming to the hospital. But that would come later. Now, in Miami Beach in 1964, he was sitting in the tiny space behind the curtain with the fish, talking quietly with his mother and waiting. And then the tiny old man who was my father’s father, who had had a heart attack, did not die; and the drama was over.
It was when we flew home that the strange return, the circling, began.
Who wandered widely.
The English language has several nouns for the act of moving through geographical space from one point to another. The provenances of these words, the places they came from, can be interesting; can tell us something about what we have thought, over the centuries and millennia, about just what this act consists of and what it means.
“Voyage,” for instance, derives from the Old French voiage, a word that comes into English (as so many do) from Latin, in this case the word viaticum, “provisions for a journey.” Lurking within viaticum itself is the feminine noun via, “road.” So you might say that “voyage” is saturated in the material: what you bring along when you move through space (“provisions for a journey”), and indeed what you tread upon as you do so: the road.
“Journey,” on the other hand—another word for the same activity—is rooted in the temporal, derived as it is from the Old French jornée, a word that traces its ancestry to the Latin diurnum, “the portion for a day,” which stems ultimately from dies, “day.” It is not hard to imagine how “the portion for the day” became the word for “trip”: long ago, when a journey might take months and even years—say, from Troy, now a crumbling ruin in Turkey, to Ithaca, a rocky island in the Ionian Sea, a place undistinguished by any significant remains—long ago it was safer and more comfortable to speak not of the “voyage,” the viaticum, what you needed to survive your movement through space, but of a single day’s progress. Over time, the part came to stand for the whole, one day’s movement for however long it takes to get where you’re going—which could be a week, a month, a year, even (as we know) ten years. What is touching about the word “journey” is the thought that in those olden days, when the word was newborn, just one day’s worth of movement was a significant enough activity, an arduous enough enterprise, to warrant a name of its own: journey.
This talk of arduousness brings me to a third way of referring to the activity we are considering here: “travel.” Today, when we hear the word, we think of pleasure, something you do in your spare time, the name of a section of the paper that you linger over on a Sunday. What is the connection to arduousness? “Travel,” as it happens, is a first cousin of “travail,” which the chunky Merriam-Webster dictionary that my father bought for me almost forty years ago, when I was on the eve of the first significant journey I myself ever made—from our New York suburb to the University of Virginia, North to South, high school to college—defines as “painful or laborious effort.” Pain can indeed be glimpsed, like a palimpsest, dimly floating behind the letters that spell TRAVAIL, thanks to the word’s odd etymology: it comes to us, via Middle English and after a restful stop in Old French, from the medieval Latin trepalium, “instrument of torture.” So “travel” suggests the emotional dimension of traveling: not its material accessories, or how long it may last, but how it feels. For in the days when these words took their shape and meaning, travel was above all difficult, painful, arduous, something strenuously avoided by most people.
The one word in the English language that combines all of the various resonances that belong severally to “voyage” and “journey” and “travel”—the distance but also the time, the time but also the emotion, the arduousness and the danger—comes not from Latin but from Greek. That word is “odyssey.”
We owe this word to two proper nouns. Most recently, it derives from the classical Greek odysseia: the name of an epic poem about a hero called Odysseus. Now many people know that Odysseus’ story is about voyages: he traveled far by sea, after all, and (ironically) lost not only everything that he started out with but everything he accumulated on the way. (So much for “provisions for a journey.”) People also know that he traveled through time, too: the decade he and the Greeks were besieging Troy, the ten arduous years he spent trying to return home, where sensible people stay put.
So we know about the voyages and the journey, the space and the time. What very few people know, unless they know Greek, is that the magical third element—emotion—is built into the name of this curious hero. A story that is told within the Odyssey describes the day on which the infant Odysseus got his name; the story, to which I shall return, conveniently provides the etymology for that name. Just as you can see the Latin word via lurking in viaticum (and, thus, in voiage and “voyage” as well), people who know Greek can see, just below the surface of the name “Odysseus,” the word odynê. You may think you don’t recognize it, but think again. Think, for instance, of the word “anodyne,” which the dictionary my father gave me defines as “a painkilling drug or medicine; not likely to provoke offense.” “Anodyne” is actually a compound of two Greek words which together mean “without pain”; the an- is the “without,” and so the -odynê has to be “pain.” This is the root of Odysseus’ name, and of his poem’s name, too. The hero of this vast epic of voyaging, journeying, and travel is, literally, “the man of pain.” He is the one who travels; he is the one who suffers.
And how not? For a tale of travel is, necessarily, also a tale of separation, of being sundered from the ones you are leaving behind. Even people who have not read the Odyssey are likely to have heard the legend of a man who spent ten years trying to get home to his wife; and yet, as you learn in the epic’s opening scenes, when Odysseus left home for Troy he also abandoned an infant son and a thriving father. The structure of the poem underscores the importance of these two characters: it begins with the now-grown son setting out in search of his lost parent (four whole books, as its chapters are called, are dedicated to the son’s journeys before we even meet his father); and it ends not with the triumphant reunion of the hero and his wife, but with a tearstained reunion between him and his father, by
