This last period was one in which (as we would say later on, retelling the remarkable story over and over as if to convince ourselves that it was all real) “his old self” had reappeared: a term that raises questions first posed, as it happens, in the Odyssey, a work whose hero must, at the end of his decades-long absence from home, prove to those who once knew him that he is still “his old self.” But which is the true self? the Odyssey asks, and how many selves might a man have? As I learned the year my father took my Odyssey course and we retraced the journeys of its hero, the answers can be
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