The amber-sanded shore;
If you'll pardon my attempt to wax poetic."
She smiled. "Plagiarist. I know that one. And I also know there's another line in it that goes,
Troy was a steepled city,
But Troy was far away.
Far away. Get it? Or maybe it doesn't even really exist at all."
"Oh, it exists all right. You just have to want to find it." He picked up a pebble and tossed it toward the surf, now rapidly disappearing in the dusk. "So what are you trying to say?"
"I'm saying that maybe Troy was a real place and maybe not. But that's almost beside the point. What it really is is a symbol for that something or somebody we're all looking for. Whatever special it is we each want. Like when I came here to work for SatCom. Space was my Troy. It was what I wanted. And when you tried to re-create the voyage of Ulysses, you were thinking you could make something that was a myth into something that was real. Big impossibility."
"You're saying the search for Troy is actually just an inner voyage, and I got caught up in trying to make it literal. The boat and all."
"Well, that's what myth is really about, isn't it? We make up a story using real, concrete things to symbolize our inner journey."