MARCH 21, 2018
aJ
The Odyssey “With wisdom and experience, we eventually understand that our lives are vibrant, energetic, discerning, and loving only when we are in the process of living: of learning of changing, of questioning, of developing.”
I
find myself reading and thinking a lot these days about the ways we construct our moral and ethical foundation, our habits of empathy, sensitivity, and clarity regarding our view of the humanity and the world. And because I am privileged and honored to live alongside each of you, I think of how St. Andrew’s can be a source of light, clarity, courage, and meaning in your lives. Now, you might know that the poem “Ithaka” alludes to Odysseus’ famous journey home to Ithaca as depicted in Homer’s great epic The Odyssey. I spent much of the spring vacation reading, studying, and thinking about a book entitled An Odyssey, written by Bard College Professor David Mendelsohn. In this book, Professor Mendelsohn describes his experience teaching The Odyssey to his freshmen undergraduate students and to his 81-year-old father who attended and participated in the class every day during the semester. In addition, Mendelsohn’s book describes a trip he and his father made the summer after the class on The Odyssey ended: a 10-day excursion with the intention to visit many of the sites, including Ithaca, described so vividly in Homer’s poem. Therefore, Mendelsohn proposes to write about four odysseys—the one written by Homer; the odyssey of his experience teaching a seminar that included his father; the odyssey of the 10-day trip with his father; and finally, the odyssey of a son and a father’s slow, emerging sense of understanding, reconciliation, and confrontation with old age, illness, and death. Implicit in Homer’s work and Mendelsohn’s teaching is the suggestion that our lives are in their own right heroic journeys, full of twists and turns and full of the potential for hope, promise, understanding, and recognition. Both Homer and Mendelsohn suggest our
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