Last week prior to setting sail for the Thanksgiving holiday I chose to revisit Homer’s Odyssey as my first mate for the journey along Interstate 5 North. The translation, by Emily Wilson, and narration, read with depth and clarity by Claire Danes, proved to be excellent companions. Not only is Wilson the first woman to translate Homer in English, her poetry is both understandable and elevated. The first 4 hours, or 100 pages, are all introduction, which, if you haven’t committed to Homer since high school or college are more than necessary and not only pleasant but revelatory.
As I steered my ship north toward the Bay Area, day turned to “rosy-fingered” sunset, into dusk and finally into dark black night, and I listened to a man, “a complicated man” as Wilson posits as no other translator has, try to make his way home. On the heaviest travel day of the year, I took comfort in this complicated man’s plight weeping on the cold shore of Calypso’s island wishing to see the smoke rise over Ithaca again. I was surrounded by a thousand other vessels traveling north, south, west, east, all fighting for inches of paved road to make their way home. As I drew further north and into the night, into the story, torrents of rain fell onto the Central Valley, easing the choke of smoke from the fires, it fell onto the hood of my car, which felt like Zeus knocking. Some ships ran aground, wrecked or else spun off their course, tossed by the angry “wine-dark ocean” to the side of the highway.
It then occurred to me that our oldest stories in the West were about 1. War (The Iliad) and 2. The aftermath of war (The Odyssey). And this second is about feeling lost, grief-stricken, guilty, homesick, PTSD, reckoning with the dead, families in despair, returning in disguise without trust for anyone, bringing the sword back into your very home.
I was traveling to see my sister and her husband as they hosted their first Thanksgiving in their new home. I was leaving Los Angeles, which was once my childhood home and now my home as an adult. My parents who live outside of Lake Tahoe left their home to travel east. I have no home, and I have many homes. And as such I find myself similarly tossed, at times. By fate, by choice, by chance, by luck. Wilson told me that the poem is in the *nostos* category, which means *home*, which is how we get the word *nostalgia*. I wonder if the need to search for *nostos* is as human as our need to tell stories.
After the weekend, I bought the paperback to read along with Claire Danes’s voice. Reading tonight in a home I once thought would only be temporary. And it perhaps still is temporary. Or maybe home has always been the same place, only the gods continue to shift the winds and the furniture.