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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

A sweet comment. Although my father was hard, was tough, every now and then he would say things or let slip a remark that was so unexpectedly tender or generous or poetic that you’d be confounded—would find yourself in a state of what Greeks called aporia, “helplessness.” (The word literally means “without a path”; “a feeling of being stranded” would be one way of translating it.) But then, this was the parent who, for all his hardness, despite the severity that had etched itself into his very flesh—the stern horizontal lines running across his forehead like the rulings of the black-and-white-marbled composition books we dutifully took notes in, the sunken vertical planes of his cheeks beneath the ridged cheekbones and the high symmetrical arcs of his eye sockets shadowing the spheres beneath like illustrations in a geometry textbook—had somehow acquired the comically incongruous nickname “Daddy Loopy.” Daddy Loopy! we would cry on the rare occasions when he’d tickle or tease us, Who’s your Daddy Loooooopy?! he would say, slightly self-conscious but also obscurely pleased, as he tucked me in tightly, a super-duper-tucker-inner, like a mummy! which is the way I preferred it when I was four or five and he’d come into my bedroom, sitting carefully on the edge of the narrow bed he had built for me, would read me Winnie-the-Pooh. That’s okay, you’ll read it for me, I heard him say, this sweet thing he said one autumn evening half a lifetime ago, and I thought, not for the first...