Home and exile
Leaving, returning and belonging.
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The Odyssey is the pattern: a man who wants only to get home, a home that has become a trap in his absence, and a return that has to be earned by recognising and being recognised. The Aeneid is the counter-pattern: a man who cannot go home because it is burning behind him, and who must found a city he will never live in. Genesis is both, Eden lost in the third chapter and a promised land never quite reached.
Dante was exiled from Florence and wrote the Divine Comedy on the road; the poem is a journey home to a place beyond every city, and the Florentines he meets in hell are the ones who put him there. Sophocles’s last play, Oedipus at Colonus, has the old exile finding a grave in a foreign grove and blessing the city that took him. Euripides’s Medea is the exile who has nowhere to go and what she does about it.
The Americans took the theme over: Huckleberry Finn on the river, always leaving; Thoreau at Walden, a mile from town and making a home of it. Joyce’s Portrait ends with a young man choosing exile as the only way to make anything. Walcott’s Omeros brings Homer to a Caribbean island where everyone’s ancestors arrived in chains and asks what home means then.
