«Home is where one starts from.
...................................................
Here or there does not matter.
...................................................
In my end is my beginning.»
T.S.Eliot,
Four Quartets, East Coker, V.
«The Phaeacian sailors deposited the sleeping Odysseus on the shore of
Ithaca, his homeland, which he had struggled to reach for twenty years
of unspeakable suffering. He stirred and woke from sleep in the land of
his fathers, but he knew not his whereabouts. Ithaca showed to him an
unaccustomed face; he did not recognize the pathways stretching far into
the distance, the quiet bays, the crags and precipices. He rose to his feet and
stood staring at what was his own land, crying mournfully: “Alas! and now
where on earth am I? What do I here myself?” That he had been absent
for so long was not the whole reason why he did not recognize his own
country; in part it was because the goddess Pallas Athene had thickened the
air about him to keep him unknown “while she made him wise to things.”
Thus Homer tells the story of the most famous home-coming in the literature
of the world... In the beginning it is not only the homeland that shows to
the homecomer an unaccustomed face. The homecomer appears equally
strange to those who expect him, and the thick air about him will keep him
unknown. Both the homecomer and the welcomer will need the help of a
Mentor to “make them wise to things”».
Alfred Schütz,
The Homecomer
American Journal of Sociology,
1945, L(50),5, 363-376.
