Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

When I first met my friend Carl, to the question, where did you grow up, he said, Harvard — two seconds later, Harvard, Illinois. It was a joke he had long told to new acquaintances which inevitably drew a snicker. In a poem, he describes the mid-western city in a single line as “Snow falling in a barrel of engine parts.” It’s a starkly forlorn image of a post-industrial town, far from the image of students bustling to classes through ivy-covered courtyards in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not to be outdone, our country also boasts Princeton, Kentucky and Yale, Oklahoma; neither were named for their educational counterparts, but one cannot help but make the mental leap to tree-lined campuses suddenly in the heartland.

Harvard, Illinois is among a host of American cities and towns named for locales with more illustrious histories and associations: Paris, Texas; Rome, Maine; Athens, Georgia; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Well, my home state certainly delivers on creative town names, like the aspirational of Paradise, PA, or minimalist like Rough and Ready, PA, or merely descriptive like Vintage, PA, where, of course, the Amish reside. Like Harvard, Illinois, these names contain a sense of hope and connection with the possibility of something grander.

And yet, while one perspective lends place names in America as whimsical and maybe informative, other names point to the tragic history of colonialism and violent displacement of Indigenous peoples: Delaware, Massachusetts, Illinois, Dakota, and Tennessee. The land carries histories, and our language is a mirror by which we see into the past.

Today’s poem makes me think, first, of the city in upstate New York where some of my favorite poets reside. But it takes me next to that birthplace of Odysseus and that symbol of home, an emblematic journey by which we all must psychologically return.

Ithaka
by C.P. Cavafy
translated by Edmund Keeley

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for,
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it last for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.