Why Homer Matters (review)

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/books/review/why-homer-matters-by-adam-nicolson.html?_r=0

“Homer has become a kind of scripture for me, an ancient book, full of urgent imperatives and ancient meanings, most of them half discerned, to be puzzled over. It is a source of wisdom.” So begins the third chapter of Adam Nicolson’s highly accessible new book, “Why Homer Matters,” in which he compares his relationship with epic poetry to a form of possession, a “colonization of the mind by an imaginative presence from the past.” The world needs more Adam Nicolsons, unabashedly passionate evangelists for the power of ancient poetry to connect us with our collective past, illuminate our personal struggles and interrogate our understanding of human history.

For centuries, the study of Greek literature has been seen as the province of career academics. But Nicolson’s amateurism (in the best, etymological, sense of the word: from the Latin amare, “to love”) and globe-trotting passion for his subject is contagious, intimating that it is impossible to comprehend Homer’s poems from an armchair or behind a desk. If you’ve never read the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey,” or your copies have been collecting dust since college, Nicolson’s book is likely to inspire you to visit or revisit their pages.

According to Nicolson, a British baron who has written books on subjects that span the making of the King James Bible, the challenges and joys of farming, nautical voyages, and long walks through France, “you don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you.” Nicolson describes how he set out on a personal odyssey from the coast of Scotland to the gates of Hades in search of the origins of Greek poetry and Western consciousness. In all of this, he is most at home as a writer when describing landscapes, as in his depiction of Homeric Hades by way of the estuary at Huelva in southwestern Spain: “Flakes of white quartzite shine through the water between ribs of rock that veer from red to tangerine to ocher and rust to flame-colored, flesh-colored, sick and livid.”

As Nicolson relates, Homer, the blind bard of Chios who supposedly composed the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” may never have existed. Or, if he did, he most likely wasn’t the sole author of the epic poems for which he became famous. Instead, he may have culled, arranged and interpolated these foundational myths from within a living, oral tradition reaching back — through the Greek Dark Ages — to a primitive, preliterate era of Bronze Age wars and warriors sprawled across the Eurasian plains. “The poems,” Nicolson writes, “were composed by a man standing at the top of a human pyramid. He could not have stood there without the pyramid beneath him, and the pyramid consisted not only of the earlier poets in the tradition but of their audiences too.”

This is the central idea behind Nicolson’s book, which traces the origins of the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath — by way of the Minoan ruins of Knossos, the great library of Alexandria, and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens — to a period 1,000 or more years earlier than the one suggested by what he defines as the reigning orthodoxy. Nicolson contends that the epic poems reflect “the violence and sense of strangeness of about 1800 B.C. recollected in the tranquillity of about 1300 B.C.,” though not captured in writing until roughly 700 B.C. And so he believes that whoever wrote the poems down belonged to “a culture emerging from a dark age, looking to a future but also looking back to a past, filled with nostalgia for the years of integrity, simplicity, nobility and straightforwardness.” 

It is difficult to assess Nicolson’s theory, which is based on a conjecture that the “Iliad” describes a pre-palatial warrior culture that seems to align well with the “world of the gold-encrusted kings buried in the shaft graves at Mycenae,” now dated to the 17th and 16th centuries B.C. But as a thought exercise, it is often gripping and, at times, electrifying. 

According to Nicolson, “Epic, which was invented after memory and before history, occupies a third space in the human desire to connect the present to the past: It is the attempt to extend the qualities of memory over the reach of time.” The purpose of epic “is to make the distant past as immediate to us as our own lives, to make the great stories of long ago beautiful and painful now.” 

The Romanian scholar of comparative religion Mircea Eliade called this basic human impulse — to connect our quotidian existence, through ritual and myth, with the lives and struggles of the great heroes of the past — the “eternal return.” In the telling and retelling of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” we imbue our insignificant lives with meaning, transporting ourselves to a mythical time, while bringing the heroic age into our own. Throughout the book, Nicolson describes moments when his own life has been elevated or illuminated by the epics — such as his sailing across the Celtic Sea with the “Odyssey” fastened to his compass binnacle, tied open to the story of the sirens — but also moments when harrowing experiences, including being raped at knife point in the Syrian desert, have revealed to him something powerful within the poems.

The Homeric epics are long, contradictory, repetitive, composite works, riddled with anachronisms, archaic vocabulary, metric filler and exceedingly graphic brutality. Over the millenniums, Nicolson asserts, they have been cleaned, scrubbed and sanitized by generations of translators, editors, librarians and scholars, in order to protect readers from the dangers of the atavistic world lurking just below the surface of the words. He writes that everyone from the editors at the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria to the great 18th-century poet Alexander Pope wished to civilize or tame the poems, “wanted to make Homer proper, to pasteurize him and transform him into something acceptable for a well-governed city.” Part of Nicolson’s objective is to follow the poems back to the vengeful, frighteningly violent time and culture from which they came, and to restore some of their rawness.

For Nicolson, the commonly held belief that the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” were products of the late eighth century B.C., a period of Greek resurgence and prosperity, cannot account for the heterogeneity of the poems and all they contain. He prefers the view that, instead of being the creation of a single man, let alone of a single time, “Homer reeks of long use.” Try thinking of Homer as a “plural noun,” he suggests, made up of “the frozen and preserved words of an entire culture.” Seen through this lens, the ancient poems appear as a bridge between the present and an otherwise inaccessible past, a rare window into a moment of cultural convergence around 2000 B.C., when East met West, North met South, and Greek consciousness was forged in the crucible of conflict between a savage warrior culture from the flat grasslands of Eurasia and the wealthy, sophisticated residents of cities in the eastern Mediterranean. 

“Homer,” Nicolson writes, “in a miracle of transmission from one end of human civilization to the other, continues to be as alive as anything that has ever lived.” Reading “Why Homer Matters” makes one yearn for a time, almost lost to us now, when many others shared Nicolson’s enthusiasm. 

WHY HOMER MATTERS

by Adam Nicolson

Illustrated. 297 pp. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company. $30.

Bryan Doerries is a stage director and a translator. His first book, “The Theater of War: What Ancient Tragedies Can Teach Us Today,” will be published next fall.

My inspiration: Sarwat Chadda on Indian hero, Rama

Rama, hero of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, showed the author of the Ash Mistry trilogy what true heroism is: swords and magic armour aside, it means self-sacrifice, humility and defending the weak

by Sarwat Chadda

Monday 8 December 2014 03.40 EST

I grew up reading the Greek myths. I loved Jason and the Argonauts, Theseus (many a rainy day spent drawing his epic battle versus the Minotaur) and the heroes of the Iliad. Time went on and I became a fan of the Norse Gods. Odin, Loki, Sif and the whole golden, brooding crew. Oh to have a pair of pet ravens!

It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I really discovered Indian mythology. I travelled around the subcontinent and the Far East as visited places as awe-inspiring as anything out of a fantasy book. The palaces of Angkor Wat. The labyrinthine streets of Varanasi. The monasteries of Tibet. Why live in Middle Earth when you had places like this, for real?

The idea of writing a series sent in the East took almost 20 years to come to the page. The Ash Mistry trilogy takes a modern, British kid and hurls him neck deep into the war between the gods and monsters of Indian myth. I want to give the reader a taste of the magic of the Eastern world, take them on adventures beyond the now-familiar tropes of Western fantasy. The first book, Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress is set in the holy city of Varanasi. The next in Kolkata and the last in Tibet and China. It’s about reincarnation, about destiny, and about making the ultimate sacrifice. It’s about becoming a hero. But I wanted my hero, Ash, to be based not on Thor or Achilles, but on an Indian hero. And the biggest of them all is Rama.

What Rama showed me is the universal nature of true heroism. Simply put, swords and magic armour aside, it means self-sacrifice. To put all others, loved ones and strangers, before yourself. To defend the weak. To be humble and generous in victory. Things that might be called “old-fashioned”, but I prefer to call them “classic”.

Rama is the hero of the Indian epic, the Ramayana. Reduced to its bare bones it’s the story of how a prince gives up his claim to his father’s throne, lives as a peasant in the forests with wife and younger brother, and how he battles against a demon king to reclaim his wife when she is kidnapped. The demon king, Ravana, is one of the greatest villains in literature.

Honourable in his own way, it is his pride that is his downfall. He will not bow to a mere man. Even a man like Rama.

Rama doesn’t want war. He is not a glory-seeker like Achilles, nor a boastful blow-hard like Thor. He is quiet, thoughtful, and devastating. Both a man of peace and god of war.

I think this duality is why, perhaps, Indian mythology is harder to access than more familiar and partisan myths of good guys and bad guys. But that’s what makes it so special and Rama one of the most human heroes of all.

Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian!

From openculture:

Long ago, in the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, Akkadian was the dominant language. And, for centuries, it remained the lingua franca in the Ancient Near East. But then it was gradually squeezed out by Aramaic, and it faded into oblivion once Alexander the Great Hellenized (Greekified) the region.

Now, 2,000+ years later, Akkadian is making a small comeback. At Cambridge University, Dr. Martin Worthington, an expert in Babylonian and Assyrian grammar, has started recording readings of poems, myths and other texts in Akkadian, including The Epic of Gilgamesh. This clip gives you a taste of what Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of literature, sounds like in its mother tongue. Or, you can jump into the full collection of readings right here.

30 minute guitar Odyssey

September 30, 2014

7:00pm

Amphitheater, Rhodes College

"a 30 minute long composition for solo acoustic guitar and voice, which tells the story of The Odyssey in song, invoking the spirit of the ancient Greek bards who originally brought forth the timeless stories of Odysseus and the heroes of the Trojan War."

http://www.joesodyssey.com/about/

Day 24, Book 24

Odysseus reunited with Laertes,
photo of Roman sarcophagus
(Roger Ulrich)

The ghosts of Achilles and Agamemnon – both figures who have loomed large over Odysseus' martial and marital quests – unite in marveling at "Happy Odysseus!" (210) as they receive the shades of the slaughtered suitors in Hades. 

Then, another reunion (with Laertes, Odysseus' father), but not before another test through tale-telling, and another sign of "Living proof" – both his scar (that disclosed him the Eurycleia) and his trees (the vineyard here recalling the rooted bed of Book 23). 

At long last, Athena commands peace, restoring order to Ithaca and drawing closure to the epic.

Day 23, Book 23

"Tree Dream," Joan Harmon (2003)

Penelope tests Odysseus by telling Eurycleia to "move the sturdy bedstead out of our bridal chamber" – impossible, since (as the infuriated Odysseus retorts)

Not a man on earth, not even at peak strength,

would find it easy to prise it up and shift it, no,

a great sign, a hallmark lies in its construction.

I know it, I built it myself – no one else . . .

There was a branching olive-tree inside our court,

grown to its full prime, the bore like a column, thickset.

Around it I built my bedroom, finished off the walls

with good tight stonework, roofed it over soundly

and added doors, hung well and snugly wedged.

Then I lopped the leafy crown of the olive,

clean-cutting the stump bare from roots up,

planing it round with a bronze smoothing-adze –

I had the skill – I shaped it plumb to the line to make

my bedpost, bored the holes it needed with an auger.

Working from there I built my bed, start to finish,

I gave it ivory inlays, gold and silver fittings,

wove the straps across it, oxhide gleaming red.

There's our secret sign, I tell you, our life story! (210–28)

Their mutual recognition confirmed through their intimately crafted space.

Day 22, Book 22

The pent-up fury of revenge (with a guest appearance by Athena) produces gore matching any battle in The Iliad. 

Even the punishment of the women is gruesome – first, forcing them to clear the bodies and scrub the floors; then, 

as doves or thrushes beating their spread wings

against some snare rigged up in thickets – flying in

for a cozy nest but a grisly bed receives them –

so the women's heads were trapped in a line,

nooses yanking their necks up, one by one,

so all might die a pitiful, ghastly death . . . 

they kicked up their heels for a little – not for long. (494–99)

Day 21, Book 21

Apollo with lyre

Penelope has declared that she will marry the suitor who can string the bow of her supposedly absent husband. Of course everyone tries, everyone fails, and Odysseus prevails. But in the midst of the prevailing, we are given an extraordinarily lovely detail, a prolonged hesitation between the stringing of the bow and the vengeful launching of the arrows. Colum's version reads: "For long Odysseus stood with the bow in his hands, handling it as a minstrel handles a lyre when he stretches a cord or tightens a peg. Then he bent the great bow; he bent it without an effort, and at his touch the bow-string made a sound that was like the cry of a swallow."

Here's how George Chapman's translation (c. 1615) lingers further with this same pause:

But when the wise Ulysses once had laid
His fingers on it, and to proof survey’d
The still sound plight [pliability] it held—as one of skill
In song and of the harp, doth at his will,
In tuning of his instrument, extend
A string out with his pin, touch all, and lend
To ev’ry well-wreath’d string his perfect sound,
Struck all together—with such ease drew round
The king the bow. Then twang’d he up the string,
That—as a swallow in the air doth sing
With no continu’d tune, but, pausing still,
Twinks out her scatter’d voice in accents shrill—
So sharp the string sung when he gave it touch,
Once having bent and drawn it.
Listen to how Chapman stretches these lines beyond their endings—"extend / A string out with his pin," "drew round / The king the bow." Those two extended similes likewise draw out the tension before the conclusive outburst of violence.

As noted for Book 19, the great philologist Erich Auerbach famously opens his study Mimesis with a comparison between Homeric style and the Genesis account of the sacrifice of Isaac. Auerbach insists upon the "externalization" of phenomena in Homer, characterizing the narrative as concentrating on "foreground" instead of being "fraught with background": "the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless." Perhaps true on the whole, but I'm not so certain that's the case here in this felicitous conflation of warrior and artist. The poem itself was likely sung to the accompaniment of a lyre—the epic is lyrical.

What a wonderfully self-conscious moment, then, to say that Odysseus re-familiarizing himself with his bow is somehow akin to a singer tuning a harp (and to say this via lyrics themselves performed with a lyre). As Shakespeare's Ulysses puts it, when discussing "degree" (order and hierarchy), "Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows." Odysseus' kingdom is a mess; it's out of tune. It's time to re-pair it. And the power compressed in the singular stringing of that bow chimes with the power compressed within the poet's lyre. Pluck it, and the string sings.

(p.s. an enigmatic line from the later Greek philosopher Heraclitus (who thought Homer should be flogged) also fixes upon this productive tautness: "that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre" and elsewhere: "the name of the bow is life, but its work is death.")

Day 20, Book 20

More laughter from the suitors:

. . . Athena set off uncontrollable laughter in the suitors,
crazed them out of their minds—mad, hysterical laughter
seemed to break from the jaws of strangers, not their own,
and the meat they were eating oozed red with blood—
tears flooded their eyes, hearts possessed by grief. (385–89)

At that
they all broke into peals of laughter aimed at the seer—
Plybius' son Eurmachus braying first and foremost, (398–400)

So they jeered . . . (428)

Are they meant to look insipid? rude? verging on madness?

Day 19, Book 19

Bending closer
she started to bathe her master . . . then,
in a flash, she knew the scar –
       that old wound
made years ago by a boar's white tusk . . . (444–47)

This marvelous instant of recognition occasioned an extraordinary meditation by Erich Auerbach, a brilliant critic who contrasted the narration of the Homeric epic with that of the Hebrew Bible. He concludes: 

the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present. . . . 

It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, [the Homeric is] externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the [Biblical] externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.”

The entire essay can be found here; really, I can't recommend it highly enough. Please take a moment to read it, in conjunction with Book 19. 

Day 18, Book 18

Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter (2008)

"And Antinous, that grand prince, hearing them wrangle,
broke into gloating laughter . . .

All leapt from their seats with whoops of laughter . . . " (41–42, 48)

Why do we laugh? Because we are relieved, or find something incongruous? Philosophers have often puzzled over an explanation for this oddly human behavior. Plato was discomfited by the Gods' laughter at lame Hephaestus in The Iliad.  Hobbes thought laughter a sign of superior feeling, the apprehension of "sudden glory."

The suitors' laughter, here instigated by Antinous, confirms yet again their callousness, their willful delight in witnessing cruelty (sadly akin to contemporary youtube videos of fights between  homeless people). Odysseus, of course, has the last laugh.

Day 17, Book 17

Theodor van Thulden (1606–69)

Book 16 reunited father and son, with a disbelieving Telemachus ("No, you're not Odysseus! Not my father!" [220]) finally persuaded by the ipseic declaration "No other Odysseus will ever return to you. / That man and I are one, the man you see . . ." (232–33). In Book 17, in the midst of the pitiless inhospitality he must face, Odysseus has another poignant reunion, with his loyal dog (317–60):

Now, as they talked on, a dog that lay there
lifted up his muzzle, pricked his ears…
It was Argos, long-enduring Odysseus’ dog
he trained as a puppy once, but little joy he got
since all too soon he shipped to sacred Troy.
In the old days young hunters loved to set him
coursing after wild goats and deer and hares.
But now with his master gone he lay there, castaway,
on piles of dung from mules and cattle, heaps collecting
out before the gates till Odysseus’ serving-men
could cart it off to manure the king’s estates.
Infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect,
here lay the old hound Argos.

But the moment he sensed Odysseus standing by
he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped,
though he had no strength left to drag himself an inch
toward his master. Odysseus glanced to the side
and flicked away a tear, hiding it from Eumaeus,
diverting his friend in a hasty, offhand way:
“Strange, Eumaeus, look, a dog like this,
lying here on a dung-hill…
what handsome lines! But I can’t say for sure
if he had the running speed to match his looks
or he was only the sort that gentry spoil at table,
show-dogs masters pamper for their points.”

You told the stranger, Euamaeus, loyal swineherd,
“Here, it’s all too true, here’s the dog of a man
who died in foreign parts. But if he had now
the form and flair he had in his glory days —
as Odysseus left him, sailing off to Troy —
you’d be amazed to see such speed, such strength.
No quarry he chased in the deepest, darkest woods
could slip this hound. A champion tracker too!
Ah, but he’s run out of luck now, poor fellow…
his master’s dead and gone, so far from home,
and the heartless women tend to him not at all…”

With that he entered the well-constructed palace,
strode through the halls and joined the proud suitors.
But the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos’ eyes
the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away.

Day 16, Book 16

An intriguing comment from the philosopher Hans Blumenberg:

Henri-Lucien Doucet,
Reunion of Odysseus & Telemachus (1880)

"Shipwreck, as seen by a survivor, is the figure of an initial philosophical experience. It is said that the founder of the Stoic school, Zeno of Cition, was shipwrecked with a cargo of Phoenician purple dye near Piraeus and was led thereby to philosophy, summing up: 'I was first fortunate in seafaring when I was shipwrecked.'" Vitruvius reports that the Socratic philosopher Aristippus, shipwrecked on the shores of the island of Rhodes, recognized that there were humans nearby when he saw geometrical figures traced on the beach. The account has the philosopher—who was not exactly esteemed by the other students of Socrates, because he was too well acquainted with money and pleasure—undergo a kind of conversion. He entrusted to his homebound fellow passengers the message that one ought to provide one’s children with only such possessions as could be saved from a shipwreck, for the only things important in life were those that neither the trials of fate nor revolution nor war could harm. We have here the moralizing version of an anecdote that originally related to sophistic practice: even in the hopeless situation of being shipwrecked on a foreign shore, a philosophically trained person still knows what to do, when he recognizes civilized reason in geometrical diagrams and thereupon decides to proceed immediately to the city’s gymnasium and earn through philosophical disputation what he needs to restore his lost outfit. That is, he is a man who can take care of himself rather than a man who draws lessons from the shipwreck."

Day 15, Book 15

Poor Telemachus – remember him? – has been detained at Menelaus' court since Book 4! At least he has two prophecies to encourage him.

Helen offers the first (191–200):

"Listen to me and I will be your prophet,
sure as the gods have flashed it in my mind
and it will come to pass, I know it will.
Just as the eagle swooped down from the crags
where it was born and bred, just as it snatched
that goose fattened up for the kill inside the house,
just so, after many trials and roving long and hard,
Odysseus will descend on his house and take revenge –
Unless he's home already, sowing seeds of ruin
for that whole crowd of suitors!"

The second comes from the fugitive Theoclymenus, after the return to Ithaca (594–98):

"Look, Telemachus,
the will of god just winged that bird on your right!
Why, the moment I saw it, here before my eyes,
I knew it was a sign. No line more kingly than yours
in all of Ithaca – yours will reign forever!"

Day 14, Book 14

The loyal swineherd Eumaeus urges a disguised Odysseus to "tell me the story of your troubles." Our hero launches into a semi-fictive account, one that coyly overlaps with his own life (he even gets to praise Odysseus's cunning! [530–73]) without revealing his identity. The exploits at Troy are similar, as well as the homeward travails. (The threat of his enslavement anticipates our later readings this term, whether through figures like Caliban or Crusoe or Equiano.) 

The ceaseless restlessness of "the Cretan"(/Odysseus) is captured in lines like: 

"No, it was always oarswept ships that thrilled my heart" 

and 

"Each man delights in work that suits him best" 

and 

William Blake (c. 1825)

"a spirit in me urged 'Set sail' . . ." 

The trope of the restless Odysseus recurs in Dante's (1265–1321) Canto 26 of The Inferno:

"Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
Of my old father, nor return of love,
That should have crown'd Penelope with joy,
Could overcome in me the zeal I had
To' explore the world, and search the ways of life,
Man's evil and his virtue. Forth I sail'd
Into the deep illimitable main . . ."

Tennyson (1809–92) draws upon this inquietude as well, in his Victorian version of "Ulysses":

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met; [on a plaque in Palmer 3rd!]
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

          This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. [on a plaque outside of Rhodes Tower!]

Day 13, Book 13

A lovely Homeric (or "epic") simile for the hunger for home:

As a man aches for his evening meal when all day long 

his brace of wine-dark oxen have dragged the bolted plowshare

down a fallow field – how welcome the setting sun to him, 

the going home to supper, yes, though his knees buckle,

struggling home at last. So welcome now to Odysseus 

the setting light of day . . . 

Here's the Czech novelist Milan Kundera on 'nostalgia' (from his beguiling novel Ignorance):

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostosidea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

“Odysseus and Kalypso,” Arnold Bröcklin (1882)

The dawn of ancient Greek culture brought the birth of the Odyssey, the founding epic of nostalgia. Let us emphasize: Odysseus, the greatest adventurer of all time, is also the greatest nostalgic. He went off (not very happily) to the Trojan War and stayed for ten years. Then he tried to return to his native Ithaca, but the gods' intrigues prolonged his journey, first by three years jammed with the most uncanny happenings, then by seven more years that he spent as hostage and lover with Calypso, who in her passion for him would not let him leave her island.

In Book Five of the Odyssey, Odysseus tells Calypso: "As wise as she is, I know that Penelope cannot compare to you in stature or in beauty ... And yet the only wish I wish each day is to be back there, to see in my own house the day of my return!" And Homer goes on: "As Odysseus spoke, the sun sank; the dusk came: and beneath the vault deep within the cavern, they withdrew to lie and love in each other's arms."

Day 12, Book 12

Leon Belly (1870)

Again, many of the children's retellings of The Odyssey elaborate upon these brief episodes, as if they were almost the entirety of the epic – whereas by the next book, we're already back in Ithaca, with half of the poem as yet to unfold. The proto-picaresque escapades are all related in the past tense during the narration that consumes books 9–12. 

Odysseus' resoluteness (some would say stubbornness) charts this book. Returning from the underworld, listening to the seductive sirens, not fully revealing his plans for the path between (the since proverbial) Scylla and Charybdis – all are actions characterized by defiant isolation. Not surprisingly, the insubordination by his starving "headstrong men" (349) leads to the catastrophic consumption of the "oxen of the sun." By the end of the book, we have returned to the narrative present of the Phaeacian banquet: "His tale was over now" (13.1).

Day 11, Book 11

John Flaxman (1835)

Odysseus' voyage to the kingdom of the dead . . . his unburied friend Elpenor begs for proper ceremony; the blind Tiresias prophesizes Odysseus' doom. In a poignant moment, Odysseus seeks to embrace the shade of his  mother:

Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her,
three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away 
like a shadow, dissolving like a dream, and each time
the grief cut to the heart, sharper, yes, and I,
I cried out to her . . . 

A parade of female ghosts processes by – and suddenly, we are back with Alcinous, who interrupts the telling, before Odysseus resumes. Agamemnon relates his treacherous return home (always a threat, for both Odysseus and Telemachus).

Achilles arrives, and we have something of a face-off between the hero of The Iliad and the hero of The Odyssey. Achilles addresses Odysseus as a "reckless friend . . . what greater feat can that cunning head contrive?" Odysseus seeks "to reassure the ghost," but Achilles impatiently retorts:

No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! 
By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man – 
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive –
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

Day 10, Book 10

Circe recalls Calypso – or rather, Circe anticipates Calypso, since the former precedes the latter in the chronology of encounter, if not narration.

The great African American artist Romare Bearden made a series of collages based on episodes from The Odyssey, displayed last year at the Brooks Museum. The images of Circe were particularly striking, as Bearden blends the tradition of the conjure woman with the Greek sorceress.