I’ve always fought against nostalgia, perhaps because I’m so much given to it. Nostalgia affords the pleasure of an old ache, cherished because it is familiar. The Greek word nostos, however, from which our term (combined with “pain,” as in “neuralgia”) derives, is anything but pleasurable. For the ancient Greeks, nostos denoted a fierce longing for one’s native place; our nostalgia plays with time, theirs by contrast was bound to place. “Homesickness” comes close but still falls short, for “home” conjures up not necessarily some sharply delineated plot of earth but the whole constellation of relations and affections of which home is composed; besides, it has a self-indulgent timbre, which is remote from nostos.

Odysseus, or Ulysses, is the greatest, and stubbornest, exponent of nostos. But Ulysses has also become over the centuries the very epitome of wanderlust. This contradiction in character is appropriate. Homer calls him a “man of many turns” (polutropos); that is, not merely wily, cunning, and tricky, resourceful, and unpredictable but, if I may coin a word for him, polytropical. Of all the Homeric heroes, Ulysses is the easiest to identify with. Because he is fully three-dimensional, he stands outside local time and place and is as liable to pop up in Dublin as in “sandy Pylos.”

Elias Canetti termed poets the “guardians of transformation,” and, true to form, poets have conserved, and often elaborated, the metamorphoses of this polytropical trickster from antiquity onwards. Dante consigned Ulysses to hell in a trembling cone of flame (because of that little duplicity with the Trojan horse), but he clearly admired him; in his great speech in Canto 26, Ulysses prefigures the spirit of the Renaissance and of the great voyages of exploration. You can sense Dante’s covert excitement in these prophetic lines, notwithstanding his doctrinal disapproval.

Most poets have followed this tack and presented Ulysses as an intrepid adventurer, a “peregrine spirit” (in Eliot’s phrase), ever in search of the new. This was Tennyson’s view; in his wonderful poem “Ulysses,” he rejects the comforts of idleness and old age, and ends with the ringing exhortation “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” (And by the way, isn’t it curious that Eliot, who despised Tennyson, should write, in “Four Quartets,” “Old men should be explorers,” an unmistakable echo of the great Victorian’s view?)

My own favorite variation on this theme is not to be found, however, in Dante or Shakespeare or any of the other illustrious writers whom cunning Ulysses has inveigled into immortalizing him. In fact, the poem I have in mind doesn’t even mention our paragon of twistiness but homes in, so to speak, on his goal: Ithaca itself.

In his poem “Ithaca,” composed in 1911, the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy presents Ulysses’s hometown as a shimmering destination, both achingly familiar and utterly unknowable, which shows itself to us not upon arrival there but slowly and steadily as the secret magnetic pole governing all our peregrinations. He begins thus, in Rae Dalven’s translation (“The Complete Poems of Cavafy,” translated by Rae Dalven, with an introduction by W.H. Auden; Harcourt Brace; 312 pages; $14):

When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
Then pray that the road is long,
Full of adventure, full of knowledge.
As for the terrors and perils of the way, these are already latent within us:
You will never meet the Lestrygonians, The Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,
If you do not carry them within your soul,
If your soul does not raise them up before you.

All that we see, all that we witness, on our ambling voyage takes on significance only because we have a precise, if long-deferred, destination:

Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
That you will enter ports seen for the first time
With such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
And purchase fine merchandise,
Mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,
And pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,
Buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
Visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
To learn and learn from those who have knowledge.

For Cavafy, a drab bureaucrat in his day job, an unabashed sensualist after-hours who haunted the back alleys of Alexandria in search of beautiful young men (and who recorded his trysts with delighted gusto), perfumes represent the very essence of pleasure, and so he repeats his injunction. He is, in fact, for all the stark simplicity of his style, the supreme poet of sexual pleasure, and the memory of such pleasure, evanescent as a fragrance that vanishes from the skin even as we inhale it. Cavafy’s meandering voyage to Ithaca is at once our life in parable and an emblem of realized desire, never to be rushed, but rather lingered over:

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
And even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
Rich with all that you have gained on the way,
Not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Penelope at her loom, yearning Telemachus, even the faithful dog Argus who wags his tail in recognition of Ulysses after 20 years, the suitors and the hapless serving girls, all go unmentioned in Cavafy’s poem. For Ithaca, which is compounded of all these, possesses significance only as the lodestone of nostos. Cavafy here, with sublime mischief, turns the Greek notion on its head: That fiercely longed-for piece of earth – this piece and no other – toward which all your striving has been bent, possesses no meaning apart from the voyage it has drawn you to embark upon:

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
You must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

E.M. Forster, who knew Cavafy in Alexandria, wrote that he “stood at a slight angle to the universe.” Perhaps even Ulysses needed just such a tilt to grasp “what Ithacas mean.”