No Greater Claim to

Our Credence:

On the Isle of the Nymph Calypso

Now all the others who had managed to escape destruction were safe at home, untroubled by war or the sea. Odysseus alone, full of longing for wife and friends, was kept from returning by that beautiful nymph Calypso, the powerful goddess who hoped to make him her husband. . . . that luckless but clever man Odysseus, who far from his friends, on a lonely island at the great sea's very navel, has long been miserable.

--The Odyssey, Book I

I COULD START the tale of my trip at the beginning--telling you how I stuffed my backpack and was dropped at the airport by my wife, still early enough in her pregnancy that she radiated like fresh-baked bread. On a string around my neck I wore not just a charm bearing the image of an owl--Athena's symbol, for luck--but a ring of June's, one that during our courtship she used to "forget" at my house to remind me she wasn't far off. When I told her I planned to wear the Athena charm she suggested adding the ring. I had the support, she smiled, of not just mythological women. She wished me godspeed.

I could tell how I flew to Istanbul and stayed overnight with friends, how the evening before I took my first bus toward Troy, my host explained my upcoming trip to a friend over a late glass of tea on a plaza overlooking the Bosporus. How the friend, before leaving us, wished my host good night, then put his hand on my shoulder, fixing me with a gaze: "And you," he said, shaking his head. "You have a long way to go."

I could. But that would be the wrong place to begin. In travel my model was Odysseus, and my goal was simple: to get from Troy to Ithaca, if decidedly by the scenic route. But I came on adventure looking for lessons, and this powerful lesson comes not from Odysseus but from Homer: The tale doesn't always start at the beginning. Homer starts nowhere near the beginning. So as teller of tales I follow Homer, and I start where he started.

The Odyssey begins with a ten-line proem, a prefatory passage invoking the muse and reminding us that the wily Odysseus will have many adventures, eventually arriving home safe but alone. The proem asks the muse to tell the story, "beginning wherever you wish."

The muse takes Homer at his word, beginning the story of Odysseus's return from Troy not by rushing to Troy, where such a journey presumably starts. Instead we go to Ithaca, exactly where Odysseus isn't, and we spend time with Telemachus, Odysseus's son, by now a young man of twenty. We learn about the many troubles Odysseus's long absence has caused Telemachus and his beleaguered mother, Penelope, and we even follow Telemachus as he takes a short trip looking for his missing father. Only after four entire books of such scene setting do we meet Odysseus. Even then, at the outset of Book V, we still don't go to Troy.

We finally join our hero on a tiny island: Ogygia, where he's spent the last seven years as sexual captive to the nymph Calypso. Nice work if you can get it, but Odysseus doesn't want it. That is itself a long story, and Homer makes good use of it--in medias res, the Roman poet Horace famously advised, "start in the middle of things," and a heroic adventurer weary of sex with goddesses and desperate for home sure sounds like the middle of something. So Homer starts with Odysseus on Ogygia with Calypso. And to get you to that island, Homer adds another to his list of literary firsts: He directs the world's first helicopter shot.

Book V begins with the gods on Olympus, among whom we learn that the hour of Odysseus's return has finally arrived. Zeus sends Hermes, messenger of the gods, to tell...

 

 

SCOTT HULER is the author of three books, including the acclaimed Defining the Wind. He is a frequent NPR contributor and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their son.


From the Hardcover edition.

 

No-Man's Lands by Scott Huler
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