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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

I know something about this. The students were looking at him. And then he went on. Face it! I’m the only one here who knows what it’s like to be with someone so long that they don’t look anything like the person you started out with. Of course he was right. They were eighteen, maybe nineteen. I couldn’t imagine, on this May day when my father started speaking about what it was like to watch as someone you knew long and well grew unrecognizably old, someone whom the habits of love and intimacy had grooved into your body and your soul the way that ivy will incise itself into the bark of a tree—I couldn’t imagine how old eighty-one must seem to these kids. As he began to speak I imagined the students silently studying his lined face, the age spots, the thin fluff clinging to his taut scalp. I looked at him, too, and suddenly I thought, This is what Athena makes Odysseus look like when she waves her wand at him in Book 13. “The skin withered on his curved limbs / the flaxen hair vanished from his head, and round / all his limbs she fixed an old man’s skin / and the light went out of his eyes, which were once so lovely.” I know about this, Daddy was saying. His mother, he went on, shaking his head and staring down at the floor, his mother was the most beautiful girl. Not pretty—beautiful. As I had done once many years before, when I was in high school and he was telling a neighbor how terrific my mother had looked at some event, a bar mitzvah or wedding, I thought, Why doesn’t...