What Would Odysseus Do?
"Promise me," said Professor Hughes, "that you will reread The Odyssey in ten years."
It took me a little longer, but bring on the wine-dark sea.
I have always preferred the glamour of the word odyssey to the mundane nature of trip. An odyssey implies being “off-itinerary” on an unscripted adventure. A trip I took at 27 turned out to be an odyssey. With no return ticket and a vague idea of the countries I would visit, I left New York for Istanbul. I traveled spontaneously. Liberated from guide books and travel schedules, I lingered in Turkey, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Finland, and Japan — the lure of the road winning out over the familiar tug of home. At various points, Odysseus, the ultimate impulsive traveler, spoke to me, imparting his own brand of careless carpe diem: “eat the mushroom,” “walk down the dark, empty street,” “take up with the local shepherd.” And when I felt like I was playing things too safe, I would ask myself, “What would Odysseus do?”
It is Odysseus — the Homeric hero, the ragtag warrior returning home to Ithaca after ten years of besting Trojans — who gives us the English word “odyssey.” We use the word odyssey often to imply the difficulties of encountering the unexpected. We might call something an odyssey when the predictable goes awry, like a routine commute that turns into a five-hour trip because of diversions and detours. Odyssey is applied to all sorts of quests. It’s a favorite word for book subtitles because it bestows a sense of mission and importance. On a recent trip to the bookstore I found the following subtitles: An Alaskan Odyssey, An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League, A Culinary Odyssey around the World, The One Hundred Year Odyssey of my Chinese-American Family. The idea behind all of these purposeful subtitles is that an odyssey is a difficult, challenging and ultimately worthwhile endeavor. The American Heritage dictionary tells us that an odyssey is either “an extended adventurous voyage or trip” or “an intellectual or spiritual quest.”
But the original meaning was a great deal more specific. The Greek word Odusseia means simply “the story of Odysseus.” The squat, red-headed warrior’s ordeal — his encounters with one-eyed giants, opium addicts, cannibalistic islanders, and eventual homecoming to his wife and son — has lent its name to every unscripted adventure that followed. Odyssey, the word used to describe a particular trip from Troy to Ithaca that may or may not have happened 3,200 years ago, is now shorthand for all explorations, quests, and trips of self-discovery.
Lately, I have been thinking about the original odyssey, the one taken by Odysseus. It has been 15 years since I first read the Odyssey as a college freshman.
Grinnell, Iowa, 1991. I am eighteen years old and in my first semester of college in the middle of nowhere. Along with just about every other newly pudgy, slightly dazed (“so this is college!”) freshman, I am enrolled in Humanities 101, a survey of ancient Greek literature that is a prerequisite for most majors. “It’s time to say goodbye to Odysseus and Penelope,” our professor says. Today she’s pacing the room wearing jeans, a white shirt, an oversized denim jacket, and a blue bandana that acts as a headband. She looks nothing like a professor. In fact, what she looks a lot like is a 22-year-old Bruce Springsteen groupie standing in front of the Stone Pony on the Asbury Park boardwalk. All she’s missing is the wad of gum. But it’s midway through the semester and so far the campus police haven’t interrupted class in to take into custody a delusional woman posing as a Classics professor. In a stroke of beginner’s luck, the fifteen of us in this classroom dodged the wizened, older men who rule the department and ended up with Lisa Hughes, an energetic and sarcastic 28-year-old PhD candidate who happens to be teaching at Grinnell this semester. I came, in time, to love those wizened older men and to read Latin and eat popcorn in front of their fireplaces, but I wasn’t yet ready for them at eighteen.
Just before class ends, she drops her voice and says, “I want each of you to make me a promise.” She pauses until everyone is looking at her, even John Zabel, who she’s been quietly torturing ever since he told her, “Sit down, you’re not the teacher,” on the first day of class.
“You may have enjoyed reading the Odyssey. You may even think that you know it well and have absorbed its lessons. But promise me this, that you will reread the Odyssey in ten years. You will be different people then and it will be a different book. Class dismissed.”
I walk across campus, which even in mid-October is already a barren winter-scape. The leaves have blown off the maple trees making crimson ponds of foliage on the grass; the sky is an industrial shade of grey that one associates with 19th century factory towns. I find a seat with soft green cushioning in one of a library’s luxurious soundproofed carols. During campus tours the guides never fail to point out that Rolling Stone declared Grinnell’s library the most comfortable in the nation. In fact, Grinnell is uniquely well-endowed. It is the King Midas of colleges thanks to a string of lucrative investments, and it’s the scholarship money and gleaming facilities that lure many kids from the coasts to this liberal arts college in the cornfields of Iowa.
After only two months here, I think I have put my finger on what is so existentially barren and depressing about the American Midwest. There is no escape route. In every direction, it is literally thousands of miles away from large bodies of water. And although in this century we travel by airplane and by car, there is something atavistic about the need to look out on an open horizon of water, to smell salt in the air and to know that we can fashion a raft from tree trunks and float away. In the Midwest, one simply feels trapped — hemmed in by a lonely horizon of corn and rolling farmland. Four more years until graduation, I think.
I open Book 5 of the Odyssey to find Odysseus similarly stuck, though he is in exile on a lush Mediterranean island with a goddess lover named Calypso.
“Off [Odysseus] sat on a headland, weeping there as always,
Wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish,
Gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears.”
He will remain “a prisoner of love” on Calypso’s island for seven years. It really doesn’t sound so bad, but I can relate to feeling trapped in a good situation. College life is similarly cushy and yet I want to get on with life in the real world, which I am still naïve and inexperienced enough to fantasize about. I leave him there on the beach crying for home and his wife Penelope. It will be a long time before I think about him again.
New York, 2007. My tenth college reunion rolled around in 2005. I didn’t attend my reunion because, in my mind, there are only two reasons to attend a ten-year and neither of them applied to me. The first is if you’ve accomplished something truly extraordinary and want to rub your classmates face in it. I hadn’t. The second is if you were a real fatty during college and now want to show everyone your svelte 31-year-old figure. I had no post-college extreme makeover, for good or for bad.
Maybe the real reason I had no interest in going was that I knew that Professor Hughes had long since moved on. But the flurry of nostalgic “Do you remember when?” reunion day e-mails got me thinking about the promise we had all made in her freshman humanities class. I had not reread the Odyssey at the ten-year mark because, frankly, who reads the Odyssey without an assignment or a book group? (Please e-mail me if you independently picked up the Odyssey and read it cover to cover on your own without any prodding or ulterior motive and I will send you a tray of homemade Greek baklava.) Why was Professor Hughes so specific about ten years, I wondered. Was it just the convenience of a round number and the fact that we all like to think in decades?
Then it occurred to me with all the subtlety of an in-your-face Homeric bird omen — Odysseus’s wanderings lasted ten years. Exactly ten years pass between the moment he sailed away from Troy to the moment he landed on the beach in Ithaca ready to reclaim his house and his bride. Those ten years are often seen as his prolonged coming-of-age, a humanizing process after all the long years of mutilating Trojans on the battlefield. (The Iliad’s battle scenes are as gruesome and blood-soaked as any in literature.) Each experience, each surreal encounter was supposed to teach Odysseus something, to return him to Penelope with slightly more to offer as a husband. Was Hughes suggesting that our 20s had been our wandering years — that in these last ten years we had encountered our own versions of one-eye monsters, drug pushers, cannibals, and bad boyfriends?
Will her prediction prove correct? Will the Odyssey really be a different book now that I am 34 instead of 19? Will I have more sympathy for Penelope as a spouse myself than I did as an unattached 19 year old? Will I still blame Odysseus’s crew for every bad thing that befell him? Or, this time around, will I hold Odysseus responsible for their deaths? Will I better understand the lure of Ithaca, his homeland?
I wanted to find out if ten years could make such a difference. I easily track down my old professor, who is now at Colorado College. “You want to reread the Odyssey together?” I asked. “Sure, Brue. I can give you assignments if you’re too lazy to read it without homework.” We had fallen back into our old groove rather too quickly. “Have you kept up with your Greek?” “No?” “Your Latin?” “Not even a little bit.” “Assignment one — read books one through five and call me next Wednesday at 5:30. We’ll each pour ourselves an ouzo and discuss the wine-dark sea.” •
Alexia Brue is the author of Cathedrals of the Flesh: My Search for the Perfect Bath (Bloomsbury), a travel memoir about the great bathing cultures of the world.
