The Odyssey is usually described as the story of a man trying to get home. Odysseus is trying not merely to return to Ithaca, but to become the kind of man who is fit to return. This is why, after almost three thousand years, the Odyssey continues to speak to us. At the very heart of the Odyssey, Homer hands the poem over to Odysseus himself. The Odyssey endures because Homer understood that the longest journey any of us will ever undertake is not outward across the seas, but inward into our hearts.