What is home? Is it a place? Is it a person? Is it a feeling?
I have had to address all of these questions multiple times in my life. When I was plucked from my natural habitat and thrown into the world of human life. When the family I was raised with split up. When the grandparents who raised me died one by one. When the person I chose to devote my life to decided to leave.
All of these occasions called on me to reassess what home actually means.
As a youngster it first felt like the place, the house I was raised in. The space where I was safe and loved. Then we moved and I lost my home.
As I grew a little older it became the people who placed me in a position where they cared for me enough to go to the ends of the Earth to ensure I was alright. The love between a parent and their child is unlike any other.
Then, after having built my life with someone I loved more deeply than even my forebears, they left in a way that tore the walls of that life down. Once again I had lost my home.
All I wanted was to return to any of these homes but they no longer existed. I couldn’t. That is when I began asking what home actually is.
Perhaps it is not a place or a person. Perhaps it is not even a feeling, although that feeling may be a compass pointing in its direction. I still don’t know if I have found the answer. I suspect Homer had been asking the same question nearly three thousand years before I was born.
While in this liminality where I was searching for my home, living in the house I was raised in, with living parents who loved me and friends who stood by me, I picked up The Odyssey by Stephen Fry.
Greek mythology has always sparked me. From the time I was able to read I found books that told some of these ancient and famous stories. When I was thrust into a new human school and needed to adapt, the myths I found gave me a place to be me when the children outside kept me at bay with the merciless meanness only children can impart on their peers.
But I had never read or learned about The Odyssey until it found me when I needed it.
This tale of adventure kept my mind grounded in the cold, dark nights when my only companion was crushing loneliness and its bedmate, depression. I saw in my mind the trials and terrors that Odysseus had to go through. I pictured the witches and whirlpools, cyclopes and sirens. I held those images in my imagination and that kept the heartbreak at bay for one more day.
It was a simple matter of survival.
That was last year when I was struggling to find any reason to live. The best I had was the knowledge that the world was better with me in it, even if I did nothing each day. But the books I read allowed my mind to move from that space of deep depression, if only for a little while. Living those experiences through the stories kept me alive when death seemed to be the best solution to my problems.
Now it is one year later and I am revisited by the ghosts of my past that haunt my waking thoughts and stroll through my dreams. An anniversary of pain.
Amidst this most miserly memorial I decided to buy a copy of Homer’s The Odyssey. I wanted to engage the original text as best I could since I can’t read Greek. There are many translations and it isn’t so easy to pick which one will resonate best with you until you’ve read it.
During the past year I had wandered through airports and railway stations, across Brussels, Paris, London and Amsterdam. I had spent more time walking than I had in many years before. I was not simply travelling, I was wandering, because I was lost. But it occurred to me that wandering has always been part of finding one’s way home. All creatures orient themselves toward home.
Only later did it occur to me that wandering has always been part of finding one’s way home.
This is not merely the story of a clever, cunning, conniving Greek trying to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, but the story of every person who has ever found themselves somewhere they never intended to be, longing for a home that no longer exists as they remember it. A home they have to find their way to without bearings.
The true magic of The Odyssey is not the story itself. The plot is known. The characters have been related. Over and over. Nolan’s new film is bringing it back to the forefront of popular culture. How does this story captivate humanity for so many millenia? I believe it is because the real beauty of reading the story is going on a journey for yourself. Where is your home? What will you do to get there? What monsters stand in your way?
If the reader is open and engaged enough in the process of reading, this story becomes an experience that can shift a worldview or bring peace to a restless soul. It certainly helped me slowly find my way back home. I’m not there yet. I will find my bearings and head in the direction where I believe my home is. But for now I feel at ease knowing I have been lost, that my home is no longer where I left it and I will have to face torment and trials to find my way.
Through reading The Odyssey I learned more about myself than I did about Odysseus. It is not merely the story of one person searching for home, but the story of every person who has ever found themselves somewhere they never intended to be, longing for a home that no longer exists in quite the form they recall.
Odysseus is trying to return to Ithaca. I am trying to return to myself.
But can the person who finally arrives home ever truly be the same person who first left?
