The father sat down in his son's classroom. For the next few months, he will attend his son's classics-study course with his grandchildren's students, discussing Homer's Odyssey. This worried the son a little: he didn't know how to teach his students in front of his father. He has long lived a very different lifestyle from his father, who has lived in several places, for example, while his father has lived in the same place where his children were born for decades, driving long distances to attend classes on campus. My father was eighty-two years old. He, too, had been a professor, and he proudly carried his name tag from his school office home to his study. But, as a mathematician, he decided that X was X. This seemed difficult for his son, who studied classics. Like all men, a son grew up looking for his father's approval and never got it. When he took the math problem to ask his father, the father always frown, never understand why such a simple problem, the son should not understand. How many children are scared of their "elite" parents? Perhaps since the time of Homer, the hero father has been a son's puzzle. "The Odyssey" is a hero's arduous journey back to his homeland, and a son's agonizing journey to find his father. To my father's pride and regret, he had studied Latin in high school and read the Iliad in its original form. My father always remembered their German teacher, but his Latin grew so rusty that when he picked up Homer again, he couldn't read the lines. So he went to his son's class and began reading the Odyssey once more. Its prequel is the Iliad: the Trojan War, a ten-year battle triggered by a beautiful woman named Helen. The story of the Odyssey begins when the resourceful Odysseus conquers the city of Troy with the help of horses, and the expedition's generals return home. Odysseus also returns home with his fleet. The journey home also took ten years. Odysseus blinded the son of the sea god, infuriated the sea god, and the journey home became difficult in the stormy mist. Without twists and turns and suspense, an epic tale transmitted in the form of a ballad would never be attractive, much less lasting. My father clearly didn't like Odysseus -- how could a man who had destroyed his fleet, brought back none of his teammates, and "wanted to die" be a hero? He cheated on his wife, he wasn't even a good husband and father. In class, the father was somewhat dismissive of the hero from the very beginning, raising his hand against the professor's son's point of view. There are lines in the Odyssey: "Only a few sons grow up to be like their fathers, many less than them, and a few better than their fathers. How much pressure is that on my son?" Clearly, Odysseus's son was not as resourceful and famous as his father. He searches for his father who has been absent from his life for 20 years, piecing together his father's image and growing up in the process of searching. Is it easier for a child to have a father who always exists in the imagination, or to find a real one? In class, father and son are also secretly competing. The son took exception to his father's tendency to talk about how he had learned Latin years earlier, and to his father's "X is X" criteria. Just as when he craved admiration and saw his father frowning at his math homework, his son's feelings toward his father were more or less repressed and resentful because of the seriousness and rigidity. Odysseus or the father, is he what they say he is? Or does a son who grows up by his father's side think his father is the real one? Are the people and things we know really who they are? Not necessarily. The "sweet" old man described by the students had a side that the professor's son had never seen: humorous, sweet and thoughtful. My father had a saying: "You don't know how much traffic there is." He always complains about the traffic jam, but refuses to take public transport to come to class. When he finally took the train, the son thought that the bad weather had forced his father to surrender, but he did not know that it was his students who changed him. And there was another version of the old story he had heard so many times between his father and his brother. Turns out, father is not what he always "thought". For a long time, he could not be promoted to professor because he thought his father gave up his doctoral thesis for the sake of his family. He thought his father was so serious and stubborn that he was tired of the casual nature of his mother's family -- what different people they were, his rigid father and his warm, easy-going mother; Father was quiet and silent, mother cheerful and talkative; My father seemed to keep his distance except for a few close friends, and my mother was quick to mingle. He didn't know that his father had passed up the chance to go to West Point and chose not to write his doctoral thesis... "The Odyssey" is not just a father and son story, but also a husband and wife story, with its dark secrets. With Odysseus gone and his life uncertain, the house was so full of suitors that his wife had to procrastinate. Odysseus, already suspicious, wants to test his wife's fidelity. She also wants to know if the man in front of him is her husband, so he uses a secret test that only the two of them know -- he asks the nanny to move the bed. It was an immovable bed made by Odysseus himself, made of trees deeply rooted in the ground. These things, which are not known to outsiders, bind husband and wife together. "There are bonds between people, not physical ones, but family jokes, memories, bits and pieces that only the people involved know about over the years." They hold marriages together, they hold families together. "Years later, even if everything is completely different, as long as there is this connection between two people, they can still bond." "His mother was the prettiest girl," my father said to a group of eighteen - and eighteen-year-old students. Not beautiful, but beautiful from the inside out." This is what love is all about -- watching someone you've known and been close to grow old and change beyond recognition, but your love for that person and your closeness to each other become a habit that sinks into body and soul like ivy into the bark of a tree. One would not think of the Odyssey as a father-son story, but the Odyssey study class he took with his father was soulful in its restrained and calm narration. In a reading of Homer, the family story travels through Odysseus's homecream, and because of this class, students learn about the classics and feel the connection between the epic and reality; The son sees a different father and rediscovers his family. When the course was over, the son wanted to go on an Odyssey tour with his father, exploring the ancient sites of epic poetry along the Mediterranean coast. My father, who had always turned his nose up at "unnecessary luxuries" such as cruises, sightseeing and vacations, took this "educational" trip. He chats about Homer and sings old songs on cruise ships, but shows little interest in the monuments within reach, because "epic poems are more real than relics." Soon after the Odyssey, my father fell and suffered a stroke. As the family faced the choice of whether to forgo treatment, the son recalled his father's long-ago words: "Just pull the tube out and go out for a beer." And so Daniel Mendelssohn ended The Odyssey with My Father. In the book's epilogue, the translator tells the story of Rogers and Hart, the creators of My father's favorite old song, "My Funny Valentine." The translator wrote: "If the Odyssey with My Father makes readers want to reexamine every complex and multifaceted person around them, I wish Hart, the clever wordsmith who loved rhyme and verse and brought joy and happiness to countless people through his works, could also love an imperfect, complex and multifaceted version of himself." Epic poetry has never been just a narrative of history, but an explanation of human nature, allowing us to better understand each other and ourselves.

The father sat down in his son's classroom. For the next few months, he will attend his son's classics-study course with his grandchildren's students, discussing Homer's Odyssey. This worried the son a little: he didn't know how to teach his students in front of his father. He has long lived a very different lifestyle from his father, who has lived in several places, for example, while his father has lived in the same place where his children were born for decades, driving long distances to attend classes on campus. My father was eighty-two years old. He, too, had been a professor, and he proudly carried his name tag from his school office home to his study. But, as a mathematician, he decided that X was X. This seemed difficult for his son, who studied classics. Like all men, a son grew up looking for his father's approval and never got it. When he took the math problem to ask his father, the father always frown, never understand why such a simple problem, the son should not understand. How many children are scared of their "elite" parents? Perhaps since the time of Homer, the hero father has been a son's puzzle. "The Odyssey" is a hero's arduous journey back to his homeland, and a son's agonizing journey to find his father. To my father's pride and regret, he had studied Latin in high school and read the Iliad in its original form. My father always remembered their German teacher, but his Latin grew so rusty that when he picked up Homer again, he couldn't read the lines. So he went to his son's class and began reading the Odyssey once more. Its prequel is the Iliad: the Trojan War, a ten-year battle triggered by a beautiful woman named Helen. The story of the Odyssey begins when the resourceful Odysseus conquers the city of Troy with the help of horses, and the expedition's generals return home. Odysseus also returns home with his fleet. The journey home also took ten years. Odysseus blinded the son of the sea god, infuriated the sea god, and the journey home became difficult in the stormy mist. Without twists and turns and suspense, an epic tale transmitted in the form of a ballad would never be attractive, much less lasting. My father clearly didn't like Odysseus -- how could a man who had destroyed his fleet, brought back none of his teammates, and "wanted to die" be a hero? He cheated on his wife, he wasn't even a good husband and father. In class, the father was somewhat dismissive of the hero from the very beginning, raising his hand against the professor's son's point of view. There are lines in the Odyssey: "Only a few sons grow up to be like their fathers, many less than them, and a few better than their fathers. How much pressure is that on my son?" Clearly, Odysseus's son was not as resourceful and famous as his father. He searches for his father who has been absent from his life for 20 years, piecing together his father's image and growing up in the process of searching. Is it easier for a child to have a father who always exists in the imagination, or to find a real one? In class, father and son are also secretly competing. The son took exception to his father's tendency to talk about how he had learned Latin years earlier, and to his father's "X is X" criteria. Just as when he craved admiration and saw his father frowning at his math homework, his son's feelings toward his father were more or less repressed and resentful because of the seriousness and rigidity. Odysseus or the father, is he what they say he is? Or does a son who grows up by his father's side think his father is the real one? Are the people and things we know really who they are? Not necessarily. The "sweet" old man described by the students had a side that the professor's son had never seen: humorous, sweet and thoughtful. My father had a saying: "You don't know how much traffic there is." He always complains about the traffic jam, but refuses to take public transport to come to class. When he finally took the train, the son thought that the bad weather had forced his father to surrender, but he did not know that it was his students who changed him. And there was another version of the old story he had heard so many times between his father and his brother. Turns out, father is not what he always "thought". For a long time, he could not be promoted to professor because he thought his father gave up his doctoral thesis for the sake of his family. He thought his father was so serious and stubborn that he was tired of the casual nature of his mother's family -- what different people they were, his rigid father and his warm, easy-going mother; Father was quiet and silent, mother cheerful and talkative; My father seemed to keep his distance except for a few close friends, and my mother was quick to mingle. He didn't know that his father had passed up the chance to go to West Point and chose not to write his doctoral thesis... "The Odyssey" is not just a father and son story, but also a husband and wife story, with its dark secrets. With Odysseus gone and his life uncertain, the house was so full of suitors that his wife had to procrastinate. Odysseus, already suspicious, wants to test his wife's fidelity. She also wants to know if the man in front of him is her husband, so he uses a secret test that only the two of them know -- he asks the nanny to move the bed. It was an immovable bed made by Odysseus himself, made of trees deeply rooted in the ground. These things, which are not known to outsiders, bind husband and wife together. "There are bonds between people, not physical ones, but family jokes, memories, bits and pieces that only the people involved know about over the years." They hold marriages together, they hold families together. "Years later, even if everything is completely different, as long as there is this connection between two people, they can still bond." "His mother was the prettiest girl," my father said to a group of eighteen - and eighteen-year-old students. Not beautiful, but beautiful from the inside out." This is what love is all about -- watching someone you've known and been close to grow old and change beyond recognition, but your love for that person and your closeness to each other become a habit that sinks into body and soul like ivy into the bark of a tree. One would not think of the Odyssey as a father-son story, but the Odyssey study class he took with his father was soulful in its restrained and calm narration. In a reading of Homer, the family story travels through Odysseus's homecream, and because of this class, students learn about the classics and feel the connection between the epic and reality; The son sees a different father and rediscovers his family. When the course was over, the son wanted to go on an Odyssey tour with his father, exploring the ancient sites of epic poetry along the Mediterranean coast. My father, who had always turned his nose up at "unnecessary luxuries" such as cruises, sightseeing and vacations, took this "educational" trip. He chats about Homer and sings old songs on cruise ships, but shows little interest in the monuments within reach, because "epic poems are more real than relics." Soon after the Odyssey, my father fell and suffered a stroke. As the family faced the choice of whether to forgo treatment, the son recalled his father's long-ago words: "Just pull the tube out and go out for a beer." And so Daniel Mendelssohn ended The Odyssey with My Father. In the book's epilogue, the translator tells the story of Rogers and Hart, the creators of My father's favorite old song, "My Funny Valentine." The translator wrote: "If the Odyssey with My Father makes readers want to reexamine every complex and multifaceted person around them, I wish Hart, the clever wordsmith who loved rhyme and verse and brought joy and happiness to countless people through his works, could also love an imperfect, complex and multifaceted version of himself." Epic poetry has never been just a narrative of history, but an explanation of human nature, allowing us to better understand each other and ourselves.