Reading "The Odyssey," we enter a world infused by the imagination.
Everything becomes fresh and new; familiar objects light up with an
inner radiance, as if we were seeing the sky or smelling the grass for
the first time. And we are always carried along by the steady yet
constantly varying rhythms of the meter, which serves as a counterpoint
to even the most horrific events, so that everything we read is lifted
up into the realm of the beautiful.
No detail is too small to escape the poet's attentive gaze, no dream
image too fantastic to be made humanly accessible....And woven through all these gorgeous or horrific scenes is the
central theme: the theme of going home, which is one reason "The
Odyssey" has such a universal appeal. "I know no place that is sweeter
than my own country," Odysseus says, and that is a feeling we can all
recognize. The goddess Calypso even promises Odysseus eternal life, if
only he will stay with her on her idyllic island and submit to a life of
constant sex and unalloyed sensual pleasure. But he refuses her offer.
He longs for his home and his wife more than he cares about immortality.
This is not a case of nostalgia, which is a longing for a past that can
never be and perhaps never has been, and therefore necessarily ends in
disappointment. He is longing not for a past but for a future, in a
place that is beloved beyond all others on earth or in heaven. Penelope,
his wife, was 20 when he sailed for Troy; she is 40 now, and whether or
not she has kept her physical beauty is beside the point. She is a
woman, not a goddess, but she is the one he loves. Odysseus's refusal of
immortality is the most moving tribute that a marriage has ever
received.
via
descensus Averno facilis est