For anyone who has every longed for Greece:

 

Ithaka

 As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

Angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

 

Hope the voyage is a long one.

May there be many a summer morning when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you come into harbors seen for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

 

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

 

And if you have found her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. 

 

–Constantine P. Cavafy

This post is of course two weeks late, but internet connections in hostels leave something to be desired.  Please take it for the early morning rant that it was at the time.

It is 3:00 am of my last day in Greece and I’ve just put banana bread into the oven.  I think I’ll stay up to watch the sun rise over Athens today and glory in it all.  My roommate leaves at 4:00 am to catch her flight and I’m afraid the bread will not be ready, but it felt like the appropriate final gesture to our 10 weeks in the apartment together, talking, cooking and largely getting along very well (except when papers were due).  Yes, what a life.  I called Dr. Osburg while I was making the batter because I had to find someone who would understand.  Yesterday at our final group dinner I sat next to the director of the Athens Center and for some strange reason and the accident of seating arrangements we spoke the whole evening.  He is of course a fabulously wealthy Greek who has done wonderfully for himself.  We talked about the program and about literature, and for most of the time I could only nod and agree, ask him what part of Greece he loved most and so on until he asked me if I had read any John Fowles.  This is where things come full circle, for during the summer before senior year I read Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and ranted about it on OD in a post I titled “Crazy Bowls” for reasons that escape me now.  That rant turned into an essay on what effect art can have on a person for the application to the University of Chicago, where I am about to be a fourth year.  This man sitting next to me then, had learned English from John Fowles on the Greek island of Spetses in the 60’s before John Fowles was John Fowles or had written any of his books.  This man, whose English is incidentally exquisite, had sat in a classroom where Fowles had acted out Shakespeare for the boarding school students.  Fowles has Alzheimer’s now and the mind that wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman is of course no longer what it was, but this man had spoken with him, kept in touch for years and was now sitting and talking with me and I was stunned.  I tried to find someone else in my group who had read Fowles but none of them had, and so I had to call Osburg because I knew she would understand.  She did understand and it was wonderful to hear her voice, two degrees of separation from John Fowles, she said and we understood each other.  My roommate’s alarm will ring in 5 minutes and I have not yet gone to sleep, but this is nothing new.  I need the night.  I need it desperately to soak into me and let me feel and sort my thoughts. 

 

They never warned us that coming to Greece would make us grow up.  Granted, I can’t say that everyone did, but then people are different.  Still I think it fascinating that instead of having culture shock, what I experienced was actually a striking sense of self-shock, to coin the phrase, unlike anything I have ever known.