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In his poem Ithaka, Constantine Cavafy encourages his readers to go off on a journey that will last most of their life. In the poem, he talks about how the journey needs to be full of adventure and discovery but he also warns against monsters like Laistrygonians and Cyclops, and Poseidon. The poem is clearly based on the ancient Greek story of Odysseus who sailed away from Troy and got lost for 20 years on his way home. Along the way, he met these monsters who helped reduce his crew down to nothing so that he ended up coming home all alone. The Laistrygonians were giant cannibals who ate up most of Odysseus crew from the other boats, but Odysseus and his own boat crew escaped and later found themselves on an island that belonged to a Cyclops. These Cyclops also threatened to eat them, but Odysseus managed to blind him and then trick him to escape. As he escaped, though, he let the Cyclops know his name and the creature called out to his father, Poseidon, god of the sea, to help him get his revenge. It was because of Poseidon that Odysseus was then lost for so long before he was finally able to return home. Understanding this background of the poem makes it much easier to apply it to my own life as I have already started on my journey.
Unlike Odysseus, I did not start off in a land of great wealth and a position of privilege. My home was in Korea where many of the common people are still considered to live in Third World conditions. I shared my small home with my parents and my siblings and we seemed always to be cramped for space but not usually unhappy. I grew up with plenty of ambition and a great deal of encouragement from my family to learn as much as I could. Education was very valuable in my house because it was considered the best way to improve the familys condition. As the poem says, though, she has nothing to give you now. When I finished my high school training, there was nothing left for me to do in Korea but go to work in jobs that would not help my family get ahead. I had an older brother and sisters who had tried to make things work in Korea and to help with us younger members of the family, but things had not worked out so well for them. My sisters had married away from the family and my brother had not been able to find anything that paid him more than what my father made. He got angry and invited those monsters into his life and he now has to struggle out of the mess this placed him in.
Realizing I did not want to follow in his footsteps and that I wanted a more fulfilling life than what my sisters were living, I decided about a year and a half ago to begin my own journey and to find wealth in foreign lands. As the poem suggests, may you visit many Egyptian cities to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars. Egypt was to the ancient Greeks what America is to Korea. It is a place of education and opportunity, where someone willing to work hard and dedicate themselves to their studies can become something much greater than they would have been back home in Korea. It is difficult for me, who is used to always having a family member close by, to have to work and struggle on my own without their support, and I am always tempted to try to rush my studies so that I can go back and help my family more, but my mother keeps telling me not to hurry home. Even the poem suggests that the riches to be found cannot be attained quickly, though. It says, do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island. In my studies, I have come to find that this is true because things I didnt understand last year are clear to me now as I have learned the language better and have learned new things that give me insight.
For me, my journey through school is offering me just the kind of experience the poem wishes upon its readers. When I learn new things, I understand just what the poet means when he hopes my voyage is long and filled with many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time. I think about the things I have been seeing and how they might help me give my family the kind of life I see people living here and I feel very rich, as if I am enjoying the sensual delights he talks about and know that when I return home again, I will be rich with these kinds of experiences and knowledge and my family will look at me with wonder at how wealthy I have become. It is true that my homeland gave me the journey simply because it couldnt give me what I wanted for myself or my family and forced me to look somewhere else.
I hadnt truly thought about how my journey has already changed me until I read this poem, but after I had read it, I felt a new window open in the soul that allowed me to see myself now as compared to myself when I had just arrived here. Even though Korea has nothing left to give me now, I understand now more than I did before that it is my Ithaka. I will return someday, perhaps when I am very old and retired, and will understand how it has helped to make me the person that I am and how it encouraged me to make my marvelous journey. I see American students around me who are disappointed with the promise and the richness they know their country offers them and they are frustrated because they cant seem to reach it. My country has not lied to me. I knew I had to go out and find my wealth. But these Americans all seem to think they are owed their wealth and they refuse to go work for it. They are all battling the Laistrygonians and the Cyclops and Poseidon instead of finding new harbors and setting their sails for their own new directions. I am fortunate to have been born in Korea and I already understand, as the poet says, what these Ithakas mean.
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