"An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic"

Daniel Mendelsohn gave a master class on close reading, both of a beloved epic and of a beloved parent.

• an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home.
• We saw Troy, which to our untrained eye looked like nothing so much as a sand castle that’s been kicked in by a malicious child, its legendary heights reduced by now to a random agglomeration of columns and huge stones blindly facing the sea below... We saw fat Venetian forts, squatting on parched Peloponnesian meadows like frogs on a heath after a fire, near Pílos in southern Greece, Homer’s
• at certain times blithely open and at others tightly inscrutable, sometimes of a weak blue so clear that you could see straight down to the sea urchins at the bottom, as spiked and expectant as mines left over from some war whose causes and combatants no one any longer remembers, and sometimes of an impenetrable purple that is the color of the wine that we refer to as red but the Greeks call black.
• In epic, we need the proem because it reassures us, at the very moment we set out upon what might look like a vast ocean of words, that this expanse is not a “formless void” (like the one with which another great story, Genesis, begins) but a route, a path that will take us someplace worth going.
• While he lacks the cruel glamour of the Iliad’s Achilles or the seductive slyness of Odysseus, Aeneas does embody a dogged sense of filial obligation, a quality much prized in Roman culture and signaled by the Latin adjective most often used of Virgil’s hero: pius, which means not “pious,” as might seem natural to an English-speaker’s eye, but “dutiful.”
• as sometimes happens when travel is involved, the journey home ended up eclipsing the drama that had set it in motion.
• Your first kid, it feels like a miracle, almost like a surprise, my father had said when I told him about Thomas. After that, it’s your life.
• Many of my father’s pronouncements took this x is x form, always with the implication that to think otherwise, to admit that x could be anything other than x, was to abandon the strict codes that governed his thinking and held the world in place: Excellence is excellence, period;
• Pain can indeed be glimpsed, like a palimpsest, dimly floating behind the letters that spell TRAVAIL, thanks to the word’s odd etymology: it comes to us, via Middle English and after a restful stop in Old French, from the medieval Latin trepalium, “instrument of torture.” So “travel” suggests the emotional dimension of traveling:
• What very few people know, unless they know Greek, is that the magical third element—emotion—is built into the name of this curious hero... The hero of this vast epic of voyaging, journeying, and travel is, literally, “the man of pain.”
• was in the army before I realized there was no such thing as “battle fa-ti-gyoo”! he’d say with a tight little grin, and if I happened to be there when he was telling this joke on himself I would wait, with a complicated pleasure, for the person he was telling it to to realize that the word in question was “fatigue.”
• but also the strange “middle” voice, a mode in which the subject is also the object, a strange folding over or doubling, the way a person could be a father but also a son.
• the gentle but citrusy emphasis on the word “fuss” was directed, somehow, at my mother and her family.
• But ring composition undoubtedly arose much earlier than Herodotus and his Histories, clearly before writing was even invented. ... And so ring composition, which might at first glance appear to be a digression, reveals itself as an efficient means for a story to embrace the past and the present and sometimes even the future—since some “rings” can loop forward, anticipating events that take place after the conclusion of the main story.
• those qualities being hardness and durability and, as I think he really meant, authenticity—and the weaker, mushier qualities that most other people settled for, whether in songs or cars or novels or spouses.
• I simply felt that everything about me was hopelessly mushy and imprecise, doomed to fail the x is x test. I didn’t even know what x was—didn’t know what I was or what I wanted, couldn’t account for the turbulent feelings, the heated enthusiasms and clotted fears to which I was prone. And so I hid—from many things, but above all from him, who knew so clearly what was what.
• he had a grim respect for the classical languages themselves, their grammars as impervious to emotion or subjectivity as any mathematical proof;
• that tight rueful tone he could sometimes have, a tone of voice that was the vocal equivalent of someone frowning and waving a hand dismissively, as if to say, Why bother?
• by drawing attention to the tension between what he allows himself to say (“the man”) and what he knows and we know (Odysseus), the poet introduces an important theme that will continue to grow throughout his poem, which is: What is the difference between who we are and what others know about us? This tension between anonymity and identity will be a major element of the Odyssey’s plot.
• adrift in a featureless liquid void with no landmarks in sight. In this way, the opening of this poem about being lost and finding a way home precisely replicates the surf-like oscillations between drifting and purposefulness that characterize its hero’s journey.
• I’ve always found this etymology of the word “proem” interesting because it takes you down a road from introductions to songs to the elemental idea of movement itself: the idea of, quite simply, “going.” For the Greeks, poetry was motion. In every sense, it is supposed to move you.
• a manipulator of words and hence of other people as well—this man is so undone by the sight of his failing father that he can bring himself no longer to tell his lies and weave his tales, and has, in the end, to tell the truth. Such is the Odyssey, which my father decided he wanted to study with me a few years ago; such is Odysseus, the hero in whose footsteps we once traveled.
• It is hard not to feel that Homer’s decision to obscure and blur and postpone our view of the epic’s main character is designed to pique our curiosity about this shadowy figure, who, in these crucial first pages, seems to lurk at the far edges of his own story, curiously small and difficult to make out, like one of those tiny figures in a Dutch painting that you risk not noticing at all because your eye is drawn to the painting’s ostensible subject, the figure in the foreground, and only when you peer at the picture more closely do you realize that this smaller, more distant, even partial shape is of deeper interest after all, is the element that will reward the closest study—is, perhaps, the painting’s true subject. The most famous example of this visual sleight of hand is a painting called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by the Netherlandish master Pieter Brueghel, ... In Brueghel’s hands, Ovid’s tale of a son’s willful rejection of his father’s wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.
• This story tells us a great deal about Penelope’s desperation—and about her cunning, which is every bit a match for her husband’s well-known wiles. But even more, the weaving and unweaving, knotting and then loosening, speeding and then delaying, beautifully capture the torpor, the lack of forward motion, that characterizes life on Ithaca during Odysseus’ long absence. This seesawing, the surf-like back-and-forth, is, too, the rhythm of the Odyssey itself: the forward push of the plot, the backward pull of the flashbacks, of the backstories and digressions without which the main narrative would seem thin, insubstantial. So the great epic of travel, of voyages, of journeying, begins with its characters frozen in place.
• Telemachus. (The youth’s name means “the far-off warrior”: the son who defines himself by the absence of his father has a name that recalls both the absence and the reason for it.)
• Homer resorts to when describing certain kinds of typical scenes or actions, sunrises or banqueting or arguments, “When Dawn the child of morning appeared with her fingertips of rose” or “When they had put away desire for food and drink” or “What speech has escaped the barrier of your teeth?!” So, too, with my father and driving. The parkway was a nightmare! he would say as he walked through someone’s door,
• the first reference to him is that he’s a kind of loser. He’s a castaway, he’s a prisoner, he has no power and no way of getting home. He’s hidden from everything he cares for. So it’s as if he can’t go any lower, it can only go uphill from there. Great, I said. Yes. It provides a baseline for the hero’s narrative arc.
• I talked about the stock epithets, so useful for quick identification of the characters, so crucial for oral composition. I told them to look out for “epic similes”: passages in which the poet pauses to compare a character or an action in his fabulous tale, sometimes at considerable length, to something belonging to the everyday world of his audience—of us. (My favorite of these crops up in a battle scene in the Iliad, when the poet compares a warrior who drives a spear through an enemy’s head and cantilevers the poor man out of his chariot to an expert angler landing a fish.)
• I talked about ring composition, that remarkable narrative technique that weaves the present and the past together, that allows the account of a specific episode in a character’s life to expand to encompass his entire life.
• I thought of how he’d look at the math quizzes and tests I brought home, the scrawled red X’s like angry embroidery along the side of the paper, and I had to wonder what kind of teacher PROF. JAY MENDELSOHN had been.
• Modern Greek poetry, particularly a poem by George Seferis that contains the line, “The first thing that God made was love.” The intellectual DNA in this case, the penchant for rigor, was an inheritance from Jenny’s father, who at one point had also been her teacher, a man called Strauss, a Classics scholar and political philosopher who had grown up in Germany and was a product of the particularly rigorous classical training for which that country was famous; and beyond that to Strauss’ teacher and his teacher before him, back to Friedrich August Wolf himself, the German founder of classical philology. These chains of relationships between students and their professors—the Germans, with their combination of sentimentality and reverence for intellectual authority, rightly call such intellectual mentors Doktorväter, “doctor-fathers”—snake back in time as purposefully as the ever-narrowing limbs of a family tree, a lineage of study and scholarship, of intellectual tastes and idiosyncrasies, that expresses itself, just as real bloodlines do, in resemblances that persist from generation to generation.
• This Brendan, by contrast, was as neat as an Arrow shirt advertisement. There was something precise, almost geometric, about him: the doubled circles of his glasses, the neat verticals of the part in his thick brown hair
• I’m starting to wonder if he actually prefers Mentes or Mentor or whoever to Odysseus. Maybe, for him, the father figure is actually preferable to the real thing... Well, Brendan said. For a boy who never even met his father, the question is, Which is the larger crisis: living out your life without a father, or actually meeting him for the first time twenty years later and having to get to know him? I looked at him and said, Now that is scathingly brilliant.
• The story of Agamemnon’s disastrous homecoming, a kind of negative Odyssey, weaves itself into the fabric of Odysseus’ epic from start to finish:... Homer’s skillful manipulation of the parallel homecomings reminds us of a familiar psychological truth: that a strong sense of what our own family is like, what its weaknesses and strengths are, the relative degrees of its conventionality and eccentricity, its normalcy or pathology, is often impossible to establish until we are old enough to compare it intelligently with the families of others; something we start doing only when we begin to perceive, as happens at the end of childhood, that our family is not, in fact, the entire world.
• jokes and the teasing worn smooth with time,
• the mobile mouth opening to let escape his staccato Ah!, a sound inevitably accompanied by a downward shake of the head and a small gesture, both hands spreading out before him, then dropping into his lap, as if in futility: his characteristic expression of delight at some remembered pleasure too large and complicated to describe.
• Orrefors crystal cordial glasses in unemotional colors, smoky gray, cobalt blue; Your father adores Nino, my mother would say aloud as we were getting ready to leave, as if the trip we were about to embark on were so exotic, so arduous, that it needed a justification this dramatic, this grandiose, although what struck our ears as strange wasn’t so much the announcement itself as the collocation of the words “your father” and “adores.”
• she disguised her own voice, mimicking those of the warriors’ long-lost wives. Meanwhile, inside the horse (Menelaus recalls) a number of the Greeks were on the verge of crying out in response to what they thought were their wives’ voices; they had, after all, been at war for ten years by this point, sick with longing for their homes. But the canny Odysseus wasn’t fooled: he clapped his hand over the mouths of these weaker men whom Helen’s ruse had duped. And so, Menelaus concludes, Odysseus “saved us all”
• they’re eating and drinking and it looks like a nice feast, but underneath it all they’re actually fighting. Cocking her head again, Jenny exhaled. Then she looked us over. I’ll repeat my original question, then. What does Telemachus learn in Book 4? Into the silence she finally said, Remember, this is the first adult couple he’s ever encountered. Then it came to me. He’s learning about marriage, I said.
• since ancient times many scholars and ordinary readers have seen the first four books of the Odyssey as an early if not indeed pioneering instance of the genre the Germans would later call the Bildungsroman, “formation novel”:
• the pages as cool to the touch as sliced apples,
• What thrilled me above all were the fantastically metastasizing verb tenses, the shifts in time signaled by prefixes that agglomerated like crystals, by endings that pooled at the ends of the words like honey that has dripped off a spoon onto a saucer:
• But the Odyssey, I went on, is a poem about a postwar world. It’s set in the aftermath of war, and one of the things it explores is what a hero might look like once there are no more wars to fight... One question posed by the Odyssey is, What might a heroism of survival look like?
• this poem-within-a-poem parallels crucial elements of Odyssey itself: abuses of hospitality, anxiety about adultery, the superiority of cunning to brute strength, the satisfactions to be had from vengeance. The lay of Ares and Aphrodite is, therefore, an excellent example of how the Odyssey uses what may at first appear to be digressions, material that is extraneous to the “plot,” to underscore its most important themes.
• Over the next week this became a refrain of his. The poem feels more real! he’d say each evening as people discussed the day’s activities. When he did so, he’d cast a quick sidelong glance at me, knowing how much the thought pleased me.
• To me such stories were the more precious because they were rare; but as far as the people in the ship’s lounge knew, they were the only stories he had to tell. To them, I suddenly realized, this was who he was: a lovely old man filled with charming tales about the thirties and forties, the era to which the music tinkling out of the piano belonged, an era of cleverness and confidence and sass. It was as if he were the Great American Songbook. A spasm of dark emotion coursed through me, something primitive, childish.
• Children always imagine that their parents’ truest selves are as parents;.. but why? “Who really knows his own begetting?” Telemachus bitterly asks early in the Odyssey. Who indeed. Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them.
• Now, the Greek word for “nobody” or “no one” is outis: ou means “not,” and tis is the indefinite pronoun “one.” Ou-tis, “no-one.” Odysseus, outis. The name Odysseus gives to the Cyclops is actually a kind of slurred version of his actual name. ... This was not only because outis and Odysseus sound a little alike but because at this point in the epic he actually is both “somebody” and “nobody”: he’s Odysseus, himself, but also a nobody, a man who has to reclaim his identity. ... For in Greek, mê tis, “any body,” is pronounced identically to a certain noun, mêtis, which means “tricky intelligence.” Hence there is a double layer of double entendre in this scene. On the one hand, Polyphemus has been undone by outis, nobody/Odysseus; but he’s also being undone by mêtis, anybody/trickery.
• I looked down at our clasped hands and to my surprise found that it made me feel better. As I looked around to see if anyone was watching, I realized, with a complicated feeling of relief, that whoever did see us would assume that I was leading my father by the hand. He, after all, was the one at real risk; he was the one who was terrified of falling. And so it was that I visited Calypso’s cave with my father holding my hand.
• For the hero of the Iliad, a poem that celebrates the dark glamour of early death, to announce to the hero of the Odyssey, a poem that celebrates the overriding drive to survive at all costs, that life at any price, life even as the servant of an indigent farmer, is preferable to glory among the dead, is both devastating and something of a dark joke. It’s as if the Iliad were saying to the Odyssey, You win.
• It turned out that my father wasn’t interested in what I was interested in. He didn’t want to pursue the literary implications of Odysseus’ meeting with Achilles, of the strange symbolic encounter between the Odyssey and the Iliad. Glumly he said, It reveals that you can spend your whole life believing in something, and then you get to a point when you realize you were wrong about the whole thing.
• I recall that he kept his mind active by making up Latin words for modern things—“butterfly bomb,” “air raid,” things like that. Quite amusing.
• Daddy, I said again. Let me get this straight. You had some gay Dutch boy in love with you in the Bronx who I’m pretty sure gave you the name “Loopy” and it never crossed your mind to tell me about this before? ... Then he looked up and said, It’s an Odyssey cruise. Everyone has a story to tell. And everyone has…has a flaw. Yes, I said. I guess everyone does. Then he added, lightly, Some stories just take longer to tell.
• When translated from Greek, Calypso means “conceal,” while Circe means “encircle.” So both names relate to captivity.
• As a writer, I could see the appeal of a Homer who was interested in raising profound questions about the uneasy border between fact and fiction; of a poet who wanted Odysseus’ tales to serve as a meditation on storytelling, on how a good storyteller need not be bound by the facts of what happened, which after all have a bony authenticity that often resists the meanings we would like to impose on them, but instead simply takes things that have really happened and then ... elaborates and embroiders the actual events with touches that would better highlight those notions.
• Disappointing, yes. Although I have to say there’s something kind of great about not getting there, too. You know—the idea of an infinitely receding horizon.
• But now, he says to his men, “You and I are old.” The references to old age suggest that the ending that all that furious adventuring is meant to postpone is the one that awaits us all: “Death closes all; but something ere the end / Some work of noble note, may yet be done.” And so, by the end of the poem, this Odysseus has decided to abandon the ending that Homer gave to him and return to sea, to the promise of more life: My purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. In its much-quoted final line, “Ulysses” sums up the very spirit of travel, of adventure: “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” A century after its publication, T. S. Eliot called Tennyson’s work “a perfect poem.”
• Always in your mind keep Ithaca. To arrive there is your destiny. But do not hurry your trip in any way. Better that it last for many years; that you drop anchor at the island an old man, rich with all you’ve gotten on the way, not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
• The three scenes with the dogs—the dogs that nearly attack Odysseus in Book 14; the dogs that fawn on their beloved master, Telemachus, in Book 16; and the wrenching telepathy between Argos and Odysseus in Book 17—are, in fact, designed to frame the recognition scene between Odysseus and his son in Book 16: to raise questions about how we recognize who someone is, and what true recognition means.
• Brendan said, Homer pretty much tells you how to interpret the whole book. When Telemachus comes to Eumaeus, it’s a real homecoming, and the simile compares him to an actual father, but when he’s reunited with Odysseus he’s compared to a bird of prey. Trisha looked up. There’s a kind of hysteria in the scene between the biological father and son, she said. It’s almost like they’re overcompensating.
• amusing Faulknerian stories of his childhood in Mississippi, tales that suggested that he himself was a bit dazzled by the life he had ended up having,
• So we know it’s important—you know from the start that this is a big deal, how eating something you’ve been told not to eat gets this really vicious punishment. So it’s like what happens to the Suitors, that they all have to be killed, even the nice ones, is foreshadowed all along.
• I was struck once more by how greatly he cherished the notion that the world was rough, by the bitter satisfaction with which he would flourish the story of some “little guy” who’d been broken by life, or fate, or bad luck. The roughness of the world, I knew, was what justified his own rough justice:
• The thing with the dog? I stared at him. What the fuck are you talking about? You know! The dog, the rabid dog. You know that story.
• Sometimes when I think about my father’s early years, about his fanatical pursuit of education, I imagine him as a shipwrecked man who swims wildly in the direction of a shore that, he must believe, is out there somewhere. The confidence we have in our ability to enjoy what is in the world, country music and oenophilia, species rhododendra and Shelley teacups, Jewish genealogy and Greek syntax, vintage posters and Jacques Demy, is, I now see, a kind of ironic birthright from our father, who showed us that it could be thus, as his own father had not done for him.
• once again it became clear to me how greatly the students’ interests could differ from mine. Only Damien, the Belgian boy, had posted about Odysseus’ scar. Perhaps, I thought, the fascination of the scene was greater for me, a writer, than it could be for them: ring composition, after all, being one elegant solution to a technical challenge facing anyone who wants to weave the distant past seamlessly into a narrative about the present. They were so young, I thought ruefully, their past was still so close to their present that there was no pressing need to figure out a way to reconnect them.
• Tossing her head to the side so that her new red bob flipped a bit, she said, It means that Odysseus was once like Telemachus. Through the scar flashback, the Odyssey can be about the father’s education, not just the son’s.
• The pride he took in our success must have made him feel all the more poignantly the memory of his own failures, the roads he had not been able to take—and, as I now knew, those he had, for whatever unknowable reason, chosen not to take. This endless tug-of-war between fathers and sons, successes and failures:
• I was expecting him, almost wanting him, to say “lonely.” I wanted him to say it because that adjective would have so conveniently explained so much about Daddy: his awkwardnesses, why he was so prickly, so undemonstrative. All of it. But the facts often resist the meanings we want to give them. After thinking for a few moments, Howard replied. He said, Your father was brilliant. He didn’t start out with much, but he learned a lot.
• I had reminded them of all those transformations, metamorphoses that, whatever their charm or their value for the plot, force the reader of the Odyssey, in the end, to wrestle with the question of just how it is we know who someone is when outward appearances can no longer be relied on.
• the long-awaited reunion between the husband and the wife. This tender scene follows, with almost jarring swiftness, the slaughter of the Suitors, the two moments grotesquely twined into a double climax reflecting the poem’s ongoing, paired concerns, the ethical and the emotional, the public and the personal:
• Her cautiousness in this scene, so like Odysseus’, is simultaneously a marker of the couple’s genuine like-mindedness, homophrosynê, and a frustration for Odysseus, that notorious deceiver and trickster, who finds himself in the odd position of not being believed when he finally wants to be—when he is finally telling the truth.
• The magical transformations effected by the gods, I suggested, are merely supernatural parallels to the force that really does transform our faces and bodies, withering us, making us bald and wrinkled: Time. When the exterior, the face and body, have changed beyond recognition, what remains? Is there an inner “I” that survives time?
• I know something about this, he repeated, clearing his throat bossily. As with You can’t believe the traffic or Don’t tell me what to do, these words had become part of the repertoire of stock phrases that, like a spell or an incantation, can now summon up my father vividly, the way certain aspects of his physical presence can evoke him: ... At the moment in class when we were talking about Penelope and Odysseus and my father said I know something about this, a phrase that summons him now as vividly as the smell of Old Spice aftershave, I had a sudden jabbing memory of him saying the same words when, during spring break of my junior year at the university he’d urged me so strongly to attend, convinced that it would be a better place for me, I confronted my parents and tearfully blurted out the secret I’d been keeping from them all those years. I was gay, I said, sitting on the corner of the bed and staring stupidly at the pattern on the bedspread, and my father said, in what was the most surprising of his rare softenings, I know something about this, Marlene. Let me talk to him.
• Now, in May 2011, on the last day of the Odyssey course at Bard, my father was sitting against the wall beneath the window, in the same seat he’d taken fifteen weeks earlier, that cold January morning when I’d looked over this unknown crew of teenagers for the first time, and was saying again, I know something about this. The students were looking at him. And then he went on. Face it! I’m the only one here who knows what it’s like to be with someone so long that they don’t look anything like the person you started out with... on this May day when my father started speaking about what it was like to watch as someone you knew long and well grew unrecognizably old, someone whom the habits of love and intimacy had grooved into your body and your soul the way that ivy will incise itself into the bark of a tree—
• And it’s funny, he went on, regaining his composure and squeezing his eyes tightly shut as he spoke, nodding up and down as if he were talking to himself, just as he did when he was trying to remember some bit of trivia, the name of some character actor in an old movie, the batting average of a baseball star from his childhood, some fact that would prove to you that he was still as sharp as ever, It’s funny, my father said, but I think this part of the poem is very true. There are these things you have with someone, not physical things, but private jokes and memories you gather over time, little things that nobody else knows about.
• I was realizing not only that he was right but how deeply right he was. I was realizing, for the first time, how much the Odyssey knew about this ostensibly trivial but profound real-life phenomenon, the way that small things between people can be the foundation of the greatest intimacy. And not just between husbands and wives, or lovers. I thought about “Daddy Loopy.” I thought about the bed upstairs in my study, with the silly secret of its construction.
• And then, as I glanced around the table and felt their silence, I realized that this is what those magical transformations in the Odyssey really are. It isn’t magic at all. Something happens, someone speaks heatedly or with authority—with “wingèd words,” as Homer puts it, epê pteroenta—and you suddenly see things differently: the person actually looks different. At the moment my father pushed himself back in the chair after admitting that the Odyssey had gotten something right, that between couples there are secrets that serve, in the end, as the bedrock of marriage, secrets unknown even to the children of that marriage—at that moment it occurred to me that he looked bigger and more impressive, somehow, the way that Odysseus looks taller and more beautiful when Athena needs him to succeed,
• On that May day toward the end of the seminar, my father had succeeded, too. With this fleeting display of tenderness, before an audience of children too young to understand what they were witnessing, he had, for a moment, been transformed.
• The words, indeed, are almost beside the point; the wild vowels say everything, ooooo, oohhhhh, eeeeeee. Homer knew this; simply to say aloud the two Greek words he uses for “throbbing lamentation” in that final scene of his war epic, adinou goöio, is to make the sounds of mourning: ah-dee-nouuuu go-oyyyyy-ohhhh.
• Oh, you know the story, she said, a little impatient. He was so smart, your father, and of course he got into Bronx Science. But naturally he didn’t go, because of his friend.
• a measure of homophrosynê, a parity of interests and tastes so different from what I think of as the inverted homophrosynê of my own parents, whose marriage had somehow survived—or was, perhaps, based on—so many perfectly symmetrical dissonances, his desire to travel, her insistence on staying home, she so funny and outgoing and demonstrative, he so wry and reserved and aloof…
• then my father would say, You don’t want to be haunted by an unwritten dissertation, and so I went on. All those years he had let us think he hadn’t finished because of circumstances beyond his control—because, in a way, of Mother, of us. But now it turned out that the decision had been his... Suddenly I flushed with shame and realized what the difference was. Unlike me, my father didn’t have a father who pushed him to finish, who wanted him to achieve more than he had, who was willing to have his son beat the Homeric odds and be more than his father had been.
• An advanced degree: that was good! It’s as if those were a kind of armor. Because emotionally and intellectually, he did not want to be vulnerable. Vulnerable! That’s the key word about Jay. I suppose he overcompensated by wanting to seem tough, by having this—you know, this strong ethical code. Rigid, even.
• Again and again, I’d been so intent on having the kids see things my way, so fixated on making sure that the interpretations I had absorbed as a student would be the ones that they took away, too, that I’d seen their resistances, their failures to notice what I wanted them to notice, as a problem, rather than as a solution—as a way to see something I’d never noticed myself.
• Something Brendan had said that day echoed in my mind. I wonder if you think we could say it’s a story about listening? About how your own perspective affects how you hear things? I mean, the real problem in this story is that from the very start Polyphemus hears what he wants to hear.
• Her note ended with a phrase that describes, with a terseness and lack of sentimentality I cannot help thinking my father would have admired, the effect that teachers everywhere have always hoped to have on their students: He was an incredible man and a wonderful presence in every class. Talking with him was a pleasure. I’ll always read the Odyssey with him in mind. You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching.
• These pairings—the death and the birth, the flash-forward and the flashback—remind you that, however much this lengthy tale may look like a richly detailed account of a single episode in its subject’s life, the Odyssey is, in fact, a kind of biography, stealthily encompassing the whole of its hero’s existence by means of narrative and chronological acrobatics. The death of Elpenor is one such feint, a stand-in for a death we will never experience in the course of the epic; but we nonetheless understand that it is only when the hero himself is dead and buried, mourned and entombed, that the story can end.
• a respect he had had for her intellect and taste, her energy and humor, her enjoyment of his bristling inquisitiveness and impatience with fools, their love of certain puns, jokes, crosswords, lyrics—this ghost-scent of what their connection to each other had once been rose powerfully into the air;
• A father makes his son out of his flesh and out of his mind and then shapes him with his ambitions and dreams, with his cruelties and failures, too. But a son, although he is of his father, cannot know his father totally, because the father precedes him; his father has always already lived so much more than the son has, so that the son can never catch up, can never know everything. No wonder the Greeks thought that few sons are the equals of their fathers; that most fall short, all too few surpass them. It’s not about value; it’s about knowledge. ... The father knows the son whole, but the son can never know the father. I thought, No wonder Odysseus can’t lie to Laertes at the end of the poem.
• A door, he said, like a child trying his words for the first time. No, Daddy, this is a bed, I said. ... I stood there blankly, looking at the book bag, at the bedspread, at the bed Daddy had built with his own hands. Then I said, aloud, Oh my God. A door, he had said.