He Just Wanted to Go Home—On Reading Homer’s The Odyssey

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost 
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy.                                    (First three lines of The Odyssey, trans. by Emily Wilson)

The great theme of The Odyssey—Homer’s masterful sequel to The Iliad—indeed, the predominant theme of the story itself, is homecoming, the imperative need we all have to get home, to arrive safely at the place we love. If only I can get back home to where it all began, the setting where everything starts, then I shall find happiness at last! Such is the common ground, the soil where the seeds of human hope are first planted.

Which brings us to Odysseus, the Homeric hero par excellence, whose home is Ithaca, a tiny island kingdom along the western coast of Greece, from whence he took leave a very long time ago. Ten awful years he will spend waging war against the Trojans and then, following their defeat, another ten trying to return to the family he left behind. 

Facing every possible impediment along the way, too, including monsters, wild beasts, lotus-eaters, a cyclops or two, deadly sirens, not to mention the machinations of gods and goddesses. And yet, in the teeth of so many impossible odds, Odysseus will persevere in steadfast pursuit of a way back to where he belongs. 

Despite temptations to yield to the sensate pleasures offered by Calypso, whose seductions he spends seven years in captivity rebuffing, or the lure of perfect knowledge and immortality of which the sirens sing, he will neither falter nor fail in his quest to return to the people and the places he loves best. Nothing matters more to Odysseus than seeing Penelope, his loving and loyal wife, and his now-grown son Telemachus, whom he left behind as an infant in order to launch 12 ships across the sea to do battle with Troy.

The Odyssey, for all the particularities of its telling, is not a story peculiar to the genius of one Greek poet, although he tells it better than perhaps any other. It is a universal tale, one which echoes down the long corridors of time, beginning with our very first parents, Adam and Eve, whose loss of Eden’s first innocence cast them into a fallen and sinful world. “A long day’s dying,” is how Milton describes their ordeal in Paradise Lost, “to augment our pain.” And yet, even as they remain outcasts from Eden, condemned to soldier on in a fallen and sinful world, they persist in their longing to return, to savor once again the joy and the peace of all that they’d left behind.

It is the Myth of the Golden Age, which we find at the origin of all literature. And no one is immune from its nostalgic stab, from the remembrance of better times before things fell apart and all that was good and wholesome came to grief. But what if we could never return to that halcyon place? That only in our dreams may we commune with those we love, that all our waking hours remain but a nightmare? What if Odysseus were not to succeed, if the quest to get back to his wife and child were to end not in the exchanges of love but of enmity and loss? Of Penelope having wearied at last of ever seeing her husband again and simply throwing in her lot with one of the countless suitors vying for her and her husband’s kingdom?  

In other words, what if there really were a loneliness so complete and final that nothing in this world could remedy the sorrow of it? A state of abandonment so definitive that neither word nor gesture could deliver us from it? Would not that frightful condition find its precise and formal theological equivalent in what we mean by Hell? Isn’t Hell that very depth of loneliness where no love, no relation of real communion, can reach one in order to set free the soul of one’s solitude? 

A life bereft of hope or home, a life lacking any sense of community or sanctuary or escape, would be simply unendurable. Think of the Prodigal Son fated never to find his father’s love but left, like the Flying Dutchman, aimless and alone forever, an eternity of grief no less. Who could possibly bear it? In her memoir of the writer John Cheever, his daughter Susan explains the origin of the book’s title, Home Before Dark:

My father liked to tell the story about my younger brother Fred…Once, at twilight after a long summer day, my father was standing outside the house under the big elm tree that shaded the flagstones in front of the door. Fred came back from playing with some friends, worn out and tired, and when he saw Daddy standing there he ran across the grass and threw his little boy’s body into his father’s arms. “I want to go home, Daddy,” he said, “I want to go home.” Of course, he was home, just a few feet from the front door, in fact. But that didn’t make any difference, as my father well understood. We all want to go home, he would say when he told the story. We all do.

But what if there were no home to go to, no one to welcome the child when he got there (when it comes to going home, we are all children); indeed, our own father telling us in words so final that nothing more will ever be said to soften the sentence: “I do not know you.” Is there not such a state of soul as I have just described awaiting us all? It is death.

“The undiscovered country,” Shakespeare calls it, “from whose bourn no traveler returns.” It is the nightfall through the silence of which we must all someday pass and will, ineluctably, pass alone. The door of death admits only one at a time, and we have all been scheduled to enter through that door. As Karl Barth reminds us,

Someday a company of men will process out to a churchyard and lower a coffin and everyone will go home; but one will not come back, and that will be me. The seal of death will be that they will bury me as a thing that is superfluous and disturbing in the land of the living.

All things living must die. But only man knows that he must die, which is why we’re given a glimpse of that final grief when we witness the loss even of a single flower or leaf. But we are not resigned to die—neither are we resigned to suffer, or to remain always alone—and so we rage, some of us, against the dying of the light. These things are a problem to us, an outrage even, against the heart of what it means to be human, which is this yearning, this brute irrepressible desire, to live always and in communion with those we love.

This is what ultimately drove Odysseus, hero of an ancient epic—who, in the face of one insurmountable obstacle after another, presses on to the very end, resolutely determined to return to the people and the places he loves. He was not “a complicated man,” notwithstanding certain woke translators characterizing him as such. He was utterly uncomplicated. He was also brave and true, which is why we keep returning to his story for the pleasure and the insight it provides concerning the meaning of man.