Ithaka

Set out for Ithaka, the poem tells you, and pray the road is long. Let there be summer mornings when you enter harbors you have never seen; let there be Phoenician trading posts heavy with coral and amber, Egyptian cities where you sit at the feet of their scholars. Cavafy turns Homer's whole anxious homecoming on its head: the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, the wrath of Poseidon are not waiting in the water, they wait inside you, and they rise only if you carry them aboard. Then the turn that gives the poem its strange comfort: Ithaka will be poor when you reach her, she has nothing left to give. She gave it already, the whole voyage, the years themselves. That is the quiet devastation here: you spend a life longing toward a place, and the longing turns out to have been the gift, and you were rich the whole way without knowing it.