Turn Left at the Trojan Horse Read Free

anyhow?
    Funny thing is, I am wholly satisfied with my surroundings. How many people can say that? I lucked into an adorable and compassionate wife, two precious sons, loyal friends, and a fine house in a charming town. What I can’t figure out is why, amid so much external contentment, I can harbor so much disillusionment. Lately, my angst has coalesced into a bit of a black cloud over my head, and it has begun to permeate the small world that means everything to me.
    I used to write from the heart—experimentally, enthusiastically. But in recent years my grand literary dreams have softened into moderate ambitions revolving around paying the mortgage. Whereas once I was inspired by a shifting view of the big picture, now I constantly find myself sweating the small stuff, micromanaging my family like a retired guy who hangs around the house and annoys everybody—only I may never be able to afford retirement. I have bouts of irritability, periods in which I have difficulty living in the moment, times where I notice my innate cynicism evolving into a sort of nihilistic grunt.
    I don’t want to be that guy . My wife doesn’t want it either.
    Amy is always the optimist, impossibly sunny—a Pooh to my Eeyore—and she has taken on the tiring responsibility of bolstering my sense of self-worth. But when I begin to cross the line—when my unreasonable expectations are thrust on my life partner and two little boys, who, after all, will be boys—her exhaustion turns to exasperation. The last thing I want is to unravel my near-perfect universe because I can’t come to grips with my own imperfections.
    â€œGo take a drive,” Amy insisted. “I’ll meet you in Ithaca.”
    I might have taken this to mean simply that I should light out after the kind of self-knowledge that only a journey can provide, that I should clear the existential cobwebs by crafting a unique itinerary through a nation’s nooks and crannies, figuring it would take me to places I had not yet explored. But when she said it, she held my gaze for just a half-second longer than usual, a moment dripping with subtext.
    Go away. Figure it out , she was saying. Don’t come back until you do .
    She looked at the calendar. “You have thirty-one days.”
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    It was a Greek philosopher, Socrates, who believed, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And it was the son of French Canadian immigrants, Jack Kerouac, who opined, “The road is life.” Some combustible combination of the two notions is the spark of my mission.
    I have decided to let Homer ride shotgun. It was he, a supposedly blind minstrel nearly three millennia ago, who crafted the original hero’s journey. Odysseus’s was a practical quest—return home to his beloved isle of Ithaka after twenty years of war and wayward travel. But at its heart, the voyage of Odysseus represents an intellectual adventure. For all the gods and monsters he encounters, his is a pilgrimage toward an understanding of humanity.
    In fact, much the same could be said about all ancient myths. “Society’s dream” is how they were characterized by Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist, who described myths as stories of man’s constant search for meaning. The heroes are archetypes, replicated in many cultures over various ages. Their tests and ordeals are the wrappings of truth, a sort of collective unconscious, a vehicle for the communication of universal insight—all in the guise of a good yarn. In other words, we were not made in the image of gods; gods were made in our image—our fears, our foibles, our fantasies. In my journey, I am not aspiring to the deeds of ancient heroes; rather those ancient heroes are manifestations of the symbolic expression of my psyche.
    I don’t claim to be Odysseus. It is simply the other way around.
    So Campbell will be a key companion of mine too, sitting in the back,