''Sing to me of the man, O Muse — that cleverest of men, most favored by the gods, most frustrated by them, too. Sing to me of endlessly lost Odysseus, whose 10-year journey home, from the scorched and bloodstained plains of Troy to the Ionian island of Ithaca, was a decade of disaster So sing to me, I begged the Muse one Friday evening in May, or, hey, you know what? Just send me an intercity bus — I've gotta get out of here.
"Here" was the seaside town of Neapoli, at the southeastern end of the Peloponnesian peninsula of Greece, where nearly two weeks of island-hopping from the Turkish coast across the Aegean Sea had come to a sudden and maddening halt. From Cape Meleas — the last location Odysseus himself recognized before the North Wind drove him into the monster-ridden lands of myth — all I had to do was hop a bus or two to the port of Patra, and from there a ferry could take me, at long last, to Ithaca, the place Odysseus called home..''
New York Times
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