About this ebook
There is a door that Homer opened and never closed.
In the eleventh book of the Odyssey , the blind shadow of Tiresias entrusts Odysseus with one final task: after his revenge on the Suitors, he must set out again, a well-planed oar on his shoulder, and trek inland until he encounters people who know neither the sea nor salt—people who will mistake the oar for a winnowing fan. There he must plant it in the ground, sacrifice to Poseidon, and then return home, where a bright old age and a gentle death, which will rise from the sea, await him.
Homer sowed prophecy and never reaped it.
Odyssey II — The song of the oar begins exactly there: in the seam.
In twenty-four rhapsodies in verse—like the songs of Homer's poems—this continuation takes the simplest and least frequent gamble: to take Homer literally. Others, over the centuries, have read the oar as a condemnation to restlessness, the hero who knows no rest. Here Odysseus leaves because he must, pays every last item on the bill—and returns. Because the true feat, he will discover, is not the horizon: it is the definitive return. To stay. To grow old. To become, finally, useless.
Beneath his footsteps, the world of heroes crumbles: palaces burn one by one, marauders with bird-beaked prows ascend the coasts, refugees carry the doors of lost homes on their shoulders. But the oar's journey traverses another geography: that of the ferrymen who speak six words a year, of the midwives who count the living in the order in which they arrive, of the old women who have kept a light in the window for thirty years. The guardians of the open roads, forgotten by the songs of kings—and whom this song, instead, records one by one.
And when the man returns, the trials no bard has ever sung will await him: a peace to be paid for out of one's own pocket, a war to be won without leaving behind songs, the art of no longer being necessary—and a patient creditor, at the loom, who has put up for collection a maturing bond: a gentle fog that will one day rise from the port, along the main road, and knock softly.
On the tomb the protagonist builds for himself while he's alive, four words are engraved. They are his epitaph and the instructions for reading the entire poem:
HE RETURNED. HE PAID. HE SLEEPS. BE QUIET.
An original epic poem in blank hendecasyllables, in four parts, with an appendix containing an index of characters and a map of the locations. For those who have loved the Odyssey and have always wondered what happened after the last line.
