The adventure whose destination is home
But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the "Odyssey."
The Odyssey makes an especially pointed example because its travels repeatedly test the desire to return. In Book V, Odysseus chooses the prospect of reaching his mortal wife and home despite Calypso's superiority in beauty and her immortality; in Book IX, the lotus threatens his companions precisely by making them forget their return. The translation inspected is Samuel Butler's prose version, first published in 1900, in Project Gutenberg's text incorporating a second-edition preface dated December 1921. It is a witness to the episodes, not evidence of Chesterton's chosen translation.
Chesterton's contrast is therefore between travel animated by attachment and emancipation from attachment itself. The poem's emotional movement requires the reader to understand why a particular home can outweigh attractive alternatives. This does not prove that readers must possess Odysseus's own domestic loyalties: imaginative sympathy might supply access to feelings they do not personally share. The allusion supports the narrower point that abolishing such feelings from one's imaginative repertoire impoverishes the reading.
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