The Odyssey

The New Yorker has a piece on the Odyssey, but not what you'd expect. It's the story (real) of a father and son, with the son being a Classics professor and his father sitting in on the class. After the semester, they take a cruise together and visit the sites in the book. Highly recommended. But, this paragraph jumped out at me.

The small group huddled around the bar had grown quiet as he spoke. To them, I realized, this was who he was: a lovely old man filled with delightful tales about the thirties and forties, the era to which the music tinkling out of the piano belonged, an era of cleverness and confidence. If only they knew the real him, I thought ruefully. His face now, relaxed and open, mellow with reminiscence, was so different from the one he so often presented, at least to his family. I wondered whether there might be people, strangers he had met on business trips, say, bellhops or stewardesses or conference attendees, to whom he also showed only this face, and who would therefore be astonished by the expression of disdain we knew so well. But then it occurred to me that perhaps this affable and entertaining gentleman was the person my father was always meant to be, or had possibly always been, albeit only with others. Children always imagine that their parents’ truest selves are as parents. But why? “No one truly knows his own begetting,” Telemachus bitterly observes, early in the Odyssey. Indeed. Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysterious to them.

Being the ripe old age of 61 now, I can see the truth of this paragraph. I will never know my parents as other than parents, no matter how hard I try. And my kids will always see me as a parent—with all of the baggage, both good and bad, that goes along with that. But is that who we really are? Or are we who we really are when we are in a different setting? Or, are we really both at the same time?

Food for thought…
Just an
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