“As many sensuous perfumes as you can”3 – Cavafy’s Ithaca Read as a Meditation on Education

Abstract

During his lifetime Constantine P. Cavafy (???????????? ?. ???????) published 154 poems. This corpus forms an integrated whole. Thoughts that are expressed succinctly in one poem are elaborated in another. Many of these thoughts touch on questions about education: Can we humans attain elevation and wisdom, or will the world inevitably make fools of us?

In this paper, one of the better-known of Cavafy’s poems, “Ithaca” from 1911, is read and interpreted in light of other works from his corpus. In this work, Cavafy contemplates education as a lifelong journey where the experience along the way counts for more than the destination. The experience illustrated in the poem transforms the senses and the body – it amends and enhances not only what one can do, but what one is.

The poem is also connected to the life of Cavafy, who was an outsider in several ways. He was a homosexual, a cosmopolitan in the multicultural society of Alexandria that was coming to an end, and a pioneer of modernist poetry writing in Greek at the edge of the Greek speaking world in the beginning of last century.

After presenting an interpretation of the poem, the paper raises questions about the course of education outlined by Cavafy and the relevance of his philosophy of education.