This is a post I wrote on my booklikes blog that I decided to include here.
End of a quest: home
5:53 pm 21 July 2015
I started thinking about this while I read the first chapters of volume three of the "First Law" series, by Abercrombie.
Usually the "getting back home" part is located at the very end of a book, just before the epilogue (I may be wrong. if I am, then sorry).
Not in this case though, but that's quite all right since at least the one quest they started in book I (if I'm not wrong) has ended.
Whenever anyone goes on a journey.. be it short or long, I feel he'll look at things differently, when he gets back home. The equivalent of this, in romance (not talking about love stories, but about
->this) is the hero embarking on a quest (this expression is quite fitting, as we'll see in a while), braving dangers of all types, fighting, making sacrifices, succeding.. and then, finally, getting back home,
changed.
A first example of this is the figure of Odysseus (or Ulysses, if you prefer). We can see that initially he is full of greed and wanting for glory.
Then he "embarks on a quest", literally.
Near the end though, Odysseus takes on a "different" personality. He disguises himself as a beggar and endures shame and humiliation just for the sake of seeing his family, not for pride. He learns the lesson of family is more important then money or fame.
(Much) later on (1900-ish, probably), Cavafy takes everything a bit further.
Here's an excerpt from Cavafy's "Ithaca"
"...
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not 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 will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
"
Cavafy imagines Odysseus is disappointed with Ithaca. Notice the plural in the last line: Ithacas, not Ithaca. With that, he wants to indicate that we carry our own "Ithaca" inside, all along. In "adventuring", in "questing", each one of us learns what our "Ithaca" is to ourselves.
This whole "finding her poor" is related to how once we get back "home", we may realize it's not like we remembered it. That it has nothing to give to us, anymore. This feeling IMHO is also shown in LOTR, in this scene:
Here we can see the four hobbits in the pub, seemingly extraneous to what's going on around them. After all they have experienced their outlook on life is deeply mutated. They go back home, expecting it to be the same.. but they realize it won't ever be the same, because the "quest" changed them deeply. They don't even receive any recognition for their deeds. Not only that, but "the Shire" no longer is "theirs". As Frodo itself says:
"But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them."