Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey reached theaters in July, and for a few weeks this summer one of the biggest films in the world has been a story that is roughly three thousand years old. That is a strange thing for an ancient poem to keep pulling off. It is worth asking why this one manages it about once a generation.
Start with the fact the poem opens on. A man cannot get home. The war is over and the distance is not great — a few weeks of decent sailing. It takes him ten years.
Every generation that reads the poem has to decide what to make of that gap. The easiest answer is obstacles. Storms, shipwrecks, a one-eyed giant, a witch who turns men into pigs. Odysseus is held up by the world, and the poem is the list of things that held him up. The film leans on that reading, partly because it is the one that looks best on a screen.
But it is not quite what the poem says. Read it again as an adult and the delays stop looking accidental. Odysseus stays seven years on Calypso's island. He arranges to hear the Sirens sing when he could simply sail past them with his ears stopped, like everyone else on board. He shouts his name at the Cyclops — the single act that curses the rest of his voyage — for no reason except that he wants to be known. Over and over, the short way home is available and he does not take it. The detour is not something that happens to the story. It is the story.
That is why the poem refuses to age. A book about a man overcoming obstacles goes stale, because obstacles change. A book about a man who keeps choosing the longer route does not, because that choice is still on the table every morning. At fifteen you read the Odyssey for the Cyclops. At twenty-five you notice that the hero spends almost the entire poem not arriving, and that nobody in it describes him as wasting his time.
Modern psychology reached a similar conclusion by a very different road. In 2000, the American psychologist Jeffrey Arnett proposed that the years from roughly eighteen to twenty-nine are not a corridor leading to adult life but a stage of life in their own right, with their own work to do. He called it emerging adulthood, and its defining feature is exploration: trying things, changing direction, finding out by elimination what does not fit. By that description, someone who has changed course twice by twenty-four is not behind schedule. The searching is the schedule.
From the inside it looks less heroic and more ordinary. Sarah Schell, a university student in Toronto, spent two years studying English before admitting the subject was not hers. She switched to journalism at twenty-one, which meant three more years of school while her friends collected their degrees. She could have applied to journalism straight out of high school. She wrote that she had not felt ready then, and that if she had forced it, she would probably have decided the field was wrong for her when the truth was that the timing was. Those two years were not the price of arriving late. They were what made arriving possible.
Homer gave the same argument to a much younger character. The poem does not actually begin with Odysseus. It begins with his son. Telemachus is about twenty, has never left the island, and has no plan. His first real decision is to take a boat and go looking for a father he cannot remember. It does not work. He comes home with little more than a rumor that Odysseus is alive, to a house still full of the same problems. He also comes home as someone who can be trusted with them. Nothing about the voyage succeeded except the person it produced.
Which is the poem's own answer to the question people keep asking about old books: what is the use, when nobody will ever hire you for knowing Homer. The Odyssey is not information. It is a shape, and it happens to be an unusually good shape for holding a life. The long way round. The years that look from outside like a delay and turn out from inside to have been the education. Odysseus is not remembered for reaching Ithaca. He is remembered for who he had to become before Ithaca would have him back.