A thirty-year-old clerk in the Irrigation Service with a scrappy education and still living with his mother wrote these immortal lines. Almost everyone has heard the opening lines which sound like the inscription on a greetings card:
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Ithaca is actually home, and Cavafy is talking about going home, which his second poem, 'The City', written several months later, makes clear:
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.
While you can never completely escape your home city - nor should you want to - voyaging ('living'?) need not be pointless. Not if you keep your eyes and ears - and nose and mind - open:
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you're seeing 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 learn and go on learning from those who know.
Summer mornings, harbours and cities there have been aplenty, but I know I haven't looked and listened, marvelled and sniffed the air as often as I should have. Too often on this journey I've looked out on the world through the template I was given and so, as he warned, I've seen my Ithaca everywhere. Yet I must not blame Ithaca. On the contrary:
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
And this versifying Egyptian civil servant goes on to say:
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
Yes, quite true but then, finally, the devastating revelation:
Have my years of journeying made any sense at all? Would I have always ended up here? Was arriving here what I was always destined for? Should I not have hoped for things elsewhere? Was I a traveller or merely adrift?
Perhaps I have wasted too much of my life here, in this small corner. Perhaps I should have taken his advice and not hurried the journey.
Thanks to Homer's Odysseus, for whom home when he reached it after ten long years was no haven either, Ithaca has become a metaphor for the human journey through life, a metaphor for all final destinations. Ithaca represents the experiences one has throughout one's lifetime.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.
C.P. Cavafy, 'The City'
