circumstances in which, finally, we’ll be happy.  We’ll have worked everything out, organised our  

way of life and finally, we’ll be happy. It’s an  enchanting idea but, ironically, it means that  

most of the time we’re restless because we’re  not there yet. The present is just the tedious,  

dreary period we have to get through until, in  the future, we can relax and enjoy ourselves. 

The unexpected companion we perhaps need to ease  our frustration is a bespectacled, Greek-speaking,  

middle-ranking civil servant: Constantine Cavafy -  who was born in Alexandria in 1863. He often felt  

displaced; he lived almost all his life in Egypt  but thought of himself as a citizen of Byzantium  

- once the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Cavafy only hit creative side in his forties and  

published little during his lifetime  - held back by anxiety that that the  

overtly homoerotic themes he often wanted to  explore would be met only with condemnation. 

The poem that has most to help us, usually  contained in a book of his Collected Poems,  

is one entitled Ithaca. Technically, the island  of Ithaca was the home of the legendary Greek hero  

Ulysses - to which he spent ten adventurous years  returning after the fall of Troy. But here it  

signals whatever we imagine our destination  in life to be. It’s the image we have in our  

heads of the distant time when we’ll be able  to live properly - once we’ve found a partner  

or bought a house or have secured a divorce or  made a fortune or retired. Cavafy doesn’t want  

to help us get there more quickly; instead he  wants to delay arrival as long as possible.

As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one

Then he invokes what he calls ‘harbours’

May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, 

you enter harbors you’re  seeing for the first time;

These, emphatically, are not our destination:  

they are the places and things, people and  experiences we encounter precisely because  

we’re not home yet and which won’t any longer  be available to us when we finally get there. 

His ideal is that when we arrive at our home we’ll  find that it is ‘poor’: it has little to offer us.

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.

If we live this way - with a warm sense of  appreciation, with a sense of adventure,  

with a willingness to explore byways  - our destination, when we get there,  

won't be the big fulfillment we once expected  it to be. We’ll have found our fulfillment  

along the way. It won't be what we find at  the end that pleases us, so much as what we  

bring with us. It won't be marriage, making  money or retiring that in itself is so great;  

what will matter is what we have discovered in  ourselves before we reached these destinations.