An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

pervasive anxiety that haunts the opening of the Odyssey, the seemingly insoluble uncertainty that afflicts the absent hero’s son, wife, and household, is symbolized by a memorable if macabre motif: an empty tomb, a missing body.

ring composition used by author!

The missing father, husband, king, has no tomb, no tumulus—

A pronounced cultural anxiety about unburied bodies is evident in many other Greek myths as well.

This notion that even villains and criminals deserve a decent burial goes back to the Odyssey itself.

after

missing pages!!

it was the blood thinners that caused the stroke, the diluted blood leaking through the blood vessels of his brain, the tiny vessels which, the neurosurgeon later told us, all those early years of smoking had made dangerously friable.

essentially the vessels have the consistency of spun sugar; it doesn’t take much to make them crumble away over time.

He quit years ago, I think in 1970. The doctor shook his head. It’s a long time, I know, but believe me the damage is already done.

It’s the last of my Assertive Phases, she said later. I laughed.

M is for “mother,” not “maid”!

when you’d open a bottle, as I liked secretly to do when I was growing up, the aroma exploded into the air as powerful as smelling salts, each suddenly recalling some evening from the distant past,

the neurosurgical ICU, Mother was asserting herself again. Well, I need a story.

She’s her father’s daughter, it occurred to me then: everything has to be a story. And then I thought of the Odyssey course.

We all need narrative to make sense of the world.

Maybe my father—who, as I now know, had grown up so alone, so taciturn—had needed my mother’s stories, long ago.

He had made me. A father makes his son out of his flesh and out of his mind and then shapes him with his ambitions and dreams, with his cruelties and failures, too. But a son, although he is of his father, cannot know his father totally, because the father precedes him; his father has always already lived so much more than the son has, so that the son can never catch up, can never know everything. No wonder the Greeks thought that few sons are the equals of their fathers; that most fall short, all too few surpass them. It’s not about value; it’s about knowledge. The father knows the son whole, but the son can never know the father.

palimpsest;

Expect the unexpected. — Both the Iliad and the Odyssey end with a suddenness that takes some students by

He’d been teaching himself Bach preludes and fugues. They’re hard, he said, but that’s the point.

I stood there blankly, looking at the book bag, at the bedspread, at the bed Daddy had built with his own hands. Then I said, aloud, Oh my God. A door, he had said.