It was late November and I was travelling in Iceland. The strangeness and solitude of volcanic, snow-covered wildernesses – such beautiful and tranquil environments – made me unusually and surprisingly happy. My senses were alert, my imagination was feasting. This was better, much better. On my return I was determined to hold on to the wonder and aliveness I’d felt while away; I would, I decided like so many returning travellers, be a tourist at home. But it didn’t work. Something about the comforts and familiarity of home slowed me down and dulled the questioning mind. I was lulled, stilled, out of focus. I was without expectations; all my yearnings had gone quiet.

When I mentioned this to people my own age, they would nod knowingly: what I was experiencing, they said, was a fact of advancing years. But how could I be on the final slope, inexorably sliding down to the end when just days before I’d been hiking over iced lakes towards unknown destinations and clinging to cliffs in furious winds and flying snow? Age alone could not explain what was happening to me.

It was in this gloomy and brooding mood that I happened upon a review of An Odyssey: A father, a son, and an epic (William Collins, 2017) by the American classicist, translator, and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn. I have enjoyed Mendelsohn’s essays in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Without further thought, I bought myself a copy.

There have been several times in my life when the right book for the right time has simply presented itself. I never expect it, I never will it, it is an inexplicable wonder of the imagination (and heart and soul) and something for which I am deeply grateful. Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey turned out to be one such book.

It tells a simple story. In the first semester of a new year, beginning in the depths of winter, Daniel Mendelsohn will be teaching a weekly class on The Odyssey at Bard, a liberal arts college about one hundred and forty kilometres north of New York City. His octogenarian father, Jay, a retired mathematician who had studied the classics as a young man, asks to attend the class. While surprised at the request, and a little worried about the effect his father might have on the other students, Daniel nonetheless agrees. Each week for a semester his father makes the long journey from New York City on the Thursday, stays with his son that night, attends the class on Friday morning and returns home by train in the afternoon. The students taking this class are undergraduates; Jay would be older than most of their grandfathers.

As a father and a very particular type of scientist, there are no shades of grey for Jay: X is X, and when it comes to Homer’s great epic two fundamentals quickly emerge as self-evident: so-called ‘heroic’ Odysseus is not a hero because he is a liar and cheats on his wife; and, given that nearly all his men die, the so-called ‘great leader’ is in fact a poor leader of men. As a loyal husband who enlisted in the army at age seventeen, Jay has the credentials to judge, and his two complaints set up a refrain throughout the course.

For several months, Daniel and Jay take an intellectual journey through Homer’s epic, and when the class finishes the two embark on a physical journey: a cruise tracing Odysseus’s travels through the Mediterranean. During the course of these two journeys, Daniel comes to understand his father in new and nuanced ways. The Odyssey, or rather his father’s response to it, helps explain Jay’s dogmatism, his reluctance to show physical affection, his habit of silence, his autocratic paternalism; it also makes sense of those rare and surprising occasions when warmth and softness do seep out.

Significantly, on their Mediterranean cruise, the Mendelsohns fail to reach Ithaka.

The book takes me on two journeys, too: back to Homer’s great epic, and, more crucially, as a result of Mendelsohn’s deft yet gentle movement between text, father–son emotions and complex family dynamics, my imagination, so sluggish since the return from Iceland, begins to move.

Mendelsohn, a translator of Cavafy, draws attention to Cavafy’s wonderful poem ‘Ithaka’ (1911), with its emphasis on the journey rather than the destination. Don’t be in a hurry to arrive, is the message of this poem; embrace the risk and surprise that infiltrates all life’s journeys; pursue new experiences. Mendelsohn mentions an earlier version of Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’ called ‘Second Odyssey’ (1894), in which Odysseus, having arrived home after an absence of twenty years, finds it dull and boring; he does not feel himself. So, too, in Tennyson’s great poem ‘Ulysses’. After striving to return to Ithaka, to his wife and son and ageing father, despite all the dangers he faced on his travels, the setbacks that occurred, the yearnings that plagued him, Tennyson’s Ulysses decides to leave home again. (I always take a copy of this poem on my own travels.)

I reread Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’ and find a copy online of Cavafy’s ‘Second Odyssey’ (I have three different volumes of the collected Cavafy, and none includes the ‘Second Odyssey’) and at the end of my readings I am steeped in journeying and alert to the shortcomings and deceptive pleasures of home. Most surprising of all, I feel lighter, happy even, and more energised than at any other time since my return from Iceland. And these poems I thought I knew so well, I’m reading them anew and they’re feeding me. Suddenly my diminished future doesn’t matter, and, in not mattering, neither does it feel diminished any more.

I have had an engrossing time with Mendelsohn, Tennyson, Cavafy, and, of course, Homer; all of these books and poems, these words and ideas, have invigorated me. It is the same sort of feeling I had in Iceland as I wandered the snowy wilderness, that sense of newness, of possibility, of there being no limits. But there has been something else as well. All these Odysseys of Mendelsohn, Homer, Tennyson, and Cavafy have provoked me; they have kick-started my zest for life, my desire for understanding, and thereby armed me for the way ahead. They have been journeyings. And they’ll always be there. Books don’t die, they don’t leave you, they don’t develop dementia. And they’re cheap, much cheaper than Iceland. They sit on their shelves waiting for you to discover them again and again and again.

Home, certainly the ideal of home, is all about comfort and certainty; home is security. This can be counter-productive in one’s advancing years. ‘Don’t expect Ithaka to make you rich,’ Cavafy writes. While there are rewards and fulfilment to be found at home, many more are located beyond the front door – whether physically, or in the imagination. Mendelsohn points out that lurking beneath the name Odysseus is the Greek word odynê, pain. Life is not a warm and cosy nest, though that may be part of it; life is also clinging to the side of a cliff with the wind whipping through you and the wild wild sea thundering below.