The Art of Manliness - #337： What Homer's Odyssey Can Teach Us Today

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast i love many of

00:00:19.120 the classic myths and poems of ancient greece my favorite though is the odyssey while on the

00:00:23.480 surface it seems to be only an epic adventure if you dig deeper the odyssey can give you insights

00:00:28.200 on fatherhood marriage and surviving in a world that's in constant flux my guest today recently

00:00:33.280 published a book exploring these themes in the odyssey particularly the themes of fathers and

00:00:37.320 sons searching for each other his name is daniel mendelson and he's a classicist essayist and book

00:00:42.000 critic and in his latest book in odyssey a father a son and epic daniel shares the experience of

00:00:46.660 having his 81 year old father enroll as a student in the undergrad seminar he taught on the odyssey

00:00:51.980 one year and the insights he gleaned about his relationship with his dad by looking at the

00:00:55.840 father-son relationships explored in the epic poem we begin our conversation with a big picture

00:00:59.840 overview the odyssey and why daniel's dad decided to take a seminar on it and then daniel and i

00:01:03.960 discuss what we can learn about the relationship between sons and father from odysseus relationship

00:01:08.000 with both his son telemachus and his father laertes we then shift to what we can learn from odysseus and

00:01:13.460 his wife penelope on forming a strong marriage and how travel can change us and why the odyssey

00:01:18.260 becomes more relevant to men when they have families of their own this is a fun podcast filled

00:01:22.680 with amazing insights about one of the greatest stories ever told after you listen to it you're

00:01:26.520 going to want to check out the show at aom.is slash odyssey you're also going to want to dust

00:01:30.460 off your copy of the odyssey itself so you can read it with fresh eyes

00:01:33.900 daniel mendelson welcome to the show thanks for having me so you wrote a you just got a new book that's

00:01:46.220 come out it's a book about my favorite book the odyssey but it's also a memoir about you and your

00:01:53.520 father you're a classics professor and one year you gave a seminar undergraduate seminar on the odyssey

00:02:00.260 and your 80 year old father asked to sit in on the seminar before we get to why your dad wanted to

00:02:08.100 take your seminar why did you decide to teach a seminar on the odyssey because that's you know that's

00:02:12.800 seminars where it's just sort of free flowing there's no real set curriculum there's reading

00:02:18.160 discussion was it a work that you spent a lot of time researching and writing about or did you have

00:02:22.860 some deeper attachment to it well it's funny because i myself i mean you know as a classic scholar my actual

00:02:33.020 specialty is greek tragedy and is not the odyssey but by a kind of funny concatenation of life events i

00:02:42.400 i ended up both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student studying the classics sort of

00:02:49.160 under the sway of two great scholars who were specialists in different ways in the odyssey so

00:02:55.720 it was sort of always haunted by the odyssey i even actually while i'm talking to i remember that

00:03:01.560 one of the most influential high school teachers i had a woman who was an english teacher at the high 0.74

00:03:09.360 school on long island that i went to when i was growing up put the odyssey in my hands she was

00:03:14.380 actually a friend of my dad her husband worked with my father and she told me oh if you ever read

00:03:20.880 anything you should read the odyssey so the odyssey has always sort of been in my life even though it's

00:03:26.020 it was not for a long time my academic specialty and then the reason i was teaching the seminar

00:03:33.180 about the odyssey is that i teach at bard college i'm not a full-time professor because i have to

00:03:40.820 have time to write and i try to think of courses that are sort of useful to the classics department

00:03:46.160 and i guess that year i had talked to the chair and they said oh it'd be good if you could do a sort

00:03:52.340 of a seminar for first-year students who were first you know coming to college and focus on one text

00:03:59.040 and you know it's essentially a way to teach them how to read as college students and so i just thought

00:04:06.080 oh it'd be great to teach the odyssey because it's a text that young people love because it's got

00:04:12.180 adventures and monsters and witches and you know it's it's a lot of fun i i think it's probably more

00:04:19.500 fun than the iliad say in certain ways and so i just thought okay i'll do a semester-long seminar on

00:04:26.060 the odyssey just reading two books per session one session per week a three-hour almost three-hour

00:04:35.480 session and just and just teach them really how to read in great detail and so that's how i came to

00:04:41.480 to teach that course well then tell us about your dad because your dad i mean i feel like i got to

00:04:46.800 know him really well the way you describe him oh good um you know even like you know pronouncing the

00:04:51.740 the accent he had coffee that's how my my my in-laws are from back east that's how they say

00:04:57.260 coffee coffee um right but tell us about him and did it surprise you that he wanted to sit in on the

00:05:02.900 seminar to some extent i mean my father was a research scientist at an aerospace corporation

00:05:08.840 grumman aerospace who built the lunar module we were a very aerospace family it was the largest

00:05:15.280 employer on long island in the 70s when i was growing up and he was a he had done an undergraduate

00:05:22.520 degree in math and was a you know he's a science guy and but he was uh largely self-taught uh in life

00:05:34.640 he was a voracious reader from childhood and he had actually been a kind of latin whiz in high school

00:05:42.800 in the bronx in the 1940s and so it didn't totally surprise me that my dad would be interested in an

00:05:51.500 odyssey course because i knew he had this lingering interest in the classicists and in the classics and

00:05:58.200 in fact when i announced to my parents during my first year at the university of virginia that i wanted

00:06:05.040 to be a classics major i may have been the only long island boy in history to announce that he wanted to

00:06:12.740 be a classicist and to be cheered on and have that announcement welcomed with open arms by his

00:06:19.440 parents because they never asked me what are you going to do with this how are you going to make a

00:06:24.180 living because my dad had been a latin guy and he thought it was just great that i was studying the

00:06:28.680 classics um and my mom did too so i was very lucky in that respect but he was a i mean on the other

00:06:35.540 hand i was a little surprised not that he was interested in the odyssey because he had a very

00:06:40.380 interested mind and was a great reader but the fact that he wanted to drive three hours every week up to

00:06:47.540 bard and sit in a classroom for two hours and 30 minutes with a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds in order

00:06:56.100 to learn how to the odyssey that did surprise me at first and when he brought it up i was a little

00:07:02.100 bemused i guess it's fair to say and i said you know are you sure you want to do this it's a lot of

00:07:07.020 it's a lot of driving for one thing but also to just sit as a as a student in a freshman seminar

00:07:13.700 and he said yeah actually he did and then i thought okay this could be interesting and of course it turned

00:07:20.360 out to be very interesting right where did it fill you with a bit of trepidation you know to know your

00:07:25.620 dad like i mean i could see like my parents sat on what i was doing it would kind of make me a little

00:07:30.220 nervous well it was i mean i will say that it did affect the dynamic of the classroom i love to teach

00:07:39.440 i'm a total ham i love being up in front of a bunch of students that it's always been a total pleasure

00:07:45.480 for me but having my father in the classroom did pose a kind of an interesting challenge and as you

00:07:53.680 know from reading the book you know we had sort of agreed beforehand that he wasn't going to say

00:07:59.520 anything uh you know i said well are you going to be active are you going to be a participant

00:08:04.560 how do you want to work this he said no i'll just sit in a corner and listen which when he said it i

00:08:11.340 believed it because that's sort of the kind of person he was he was not a performer and he didn't

00:08:16.180 like to draw attention to himself so going into this the seminar i thought okay he's just going to sit

00:08:21.520 there and the kids will stop noticing him and it will be more or less a normal class and then you

00:08:27.600 know as you know the the from the very first day of class he got very engaged and was very contentious

00:08:35.680 and very vocal so that didn't quite work out the way i thought it was going to be and it was it was

00:08:41.080 obviously it's a unique experience in my career as a teacher um i'm never going to have a parent in

00:08:48.840 my classroom again and it was actually sort of interesting it was for many reasons it was

00:08:54.960 interesting in a comic way first of all because because he was my father there was someone in the

00:09:02.400 classroom who had more authority than i did as the students saw it so i noticed as the semester wore on

00:09:09.720 that more and more if i asked a question the students would start sort of looking over towards

00:09:14.420 my father as if as if he were the professor when they were saying their answers when they were giving

00:09:19.680 their answers i thought that was very funny and um but in another way i thought it was interesting

00:09:25.500 because he as you know from reading the book he quite often challenged my interpretations of things not

00:09:35.680 i don't think because he wanted to be ornery but just because he he was himself and had a different

00:09:41.660 take on things i guess and it was like having the opposition leader in a in a legislature like

00:09:49.460 students who wanted to contend with the professor's interpretations had someone they could align

00:09:58.240 themselves with because remember these are these are first-year students they're 17 they're 18 they

00:10:03.060 tend to be intimidated quite often but i think the fact of having a grown-up in the class who was

00:10:09.040 often at loggerheads with the professor sort of emboldened them in a way that otherwise would not

00:10:15.180 have been the case and i thought that was actually kind of great that's fantastic and we'll talk later

00:10:20.400 on a little bit about um the influence that your dad had on the kids that you learned afterwards let's

00:10:26.260 talk about the other character in the book which is the odyssey itself hopefully all of our listeners

00:10:31.240 have read it or at least familiar with the general plot but looking at things from a big picture

00:10:36.540 level what makes the odyssey unique in ancient literature and you know how did it sort of set

00:10:43.220 the i don't know what sort of literary devices did it introduce into western literature that we can

00:10:48.340 we see in you know shows today that we're watching on amc we like well that that's from

00:10:52.820 the odyssey that started there well i'm how long do you have um so first of all the the

00:11:03.000 odyssey lays the groundwork for a number of genres the first of these is the adventure narrative

00:11:11.680 right a hero goes literally out on on the sea the open sea and has a number of adventures before he gets

00:11:22.380 home that is established and defined by the odyssey it's also the first homecoming narrative right

00:11:32.980 a person is separated from his family his loved ones and fights all these obstacles to come home

00:11:40.660 as you know you know there's a moment when my father and i were on a cruise that recreated the

00:11:47.940 voyages of odysseus where we were all sitting around one night over drinks and somebody asked me

00:11:52.720 do you think the wizard of oz is an odyssey narrative and i said absolutely you know there's

00:11:58.880 no place like home that could be the theme of the of the odyssey but of course there is no place like

00:12:04.340 home but it's also nice to stop on the way and meet interesting people uh which is what both

00:12:09.260 dorothy gale did and what odysseus does so it's the first homecoming adventure narrative it's the first

00:12:17.720 one could almost argue it's the first sort of science fiction narrative a hero you know as

00:12:25.120 james t kirk used to say you know boldly goes where no one has gone before to discover

00:12:31.520 uh new civilizations right so the odyssey invents creatures cultures new civilizations radically

00:12:42.760 different forms of life in order for the hero to encounter them and by uh sort of test himself

00:12:51.720 against them uh so in that sense it's certainly the first instance of i guess what we would call

00:12:56.600 fantasy literature if not science fiction um i would also say much more broadly speaking

00:13:02.620 look the classical past has bequeathed to us these sort of two great epic monuments the iliad and the

00:13:10.100 odyssey that stand as a sort of bookends uh that contain all subsequent literature and in with that in

00:13:17.460 mind one could certainly say that the odyssey is the first comedy not in the sense that it's ha ha

00:13:22.520 funny although there is a tremendous amount of humor in it odysseus is is a great sense of humor

00:13:29.140 and there are many moments of really charming uh amusing humor in it but in the sense that it is a

00:13:35.760 narrative that takes a hero puts the hero through many trials but gives the hero a happy ending that

00:13:42.080 ends with a reunion with a wife and a kind of a a wedding basically right and so in that sense it's

00:13:50.920 the model for all comedies just as the iliad is the model for all tragedies and so those are just a

00:13:58.340 few of the things uh that come to mind and also obviously uh i left out one of the most important

00:14:05.660 ones which is it's also one of the great father-son stories right little boy is separated from his dad

00:14:13.900 at birth they come together when the boy is grown up get to know each other get to understand each

00:14:20.040 other and then have this great adventure together this great challenge uh which of course is uh to

00:14:26.520 take control of their palace and and their city again uh after being uh outcast for many years and so

00:14:34.420 it's also one of the great father-son stories as i emphasize in the book well yeah that makes it

00:14:39.680 that made your dad sitting in on this class all the more poignant right and yeah one thing i think

00:14:47.120 before we got on the show we were talking about how odyssey is my favorite i've read the iliad and

00:14:51.340 the odyssey multiple times and i always like go back to the odyssey like i i'm always thinking about

00:14:57.120 the odyssey the iliad it's got some really cool battle scenes right where homer describes black blood

00:15:02.440 coming out of people's throats and whatever yeah but it leaves me cold like i don't feel like i'm

00:15:08.480 better for like i don't i don't feel like i got any life lessons from it and i think you'd hit on you

00:15:13.020 know one of the themes in the odyssey is this idea of father i feel like odysseus is he's a

00:15:17.940 multifaceted figure you know achilles is like simple like he's angry he has a very sensitive

00:15:23.260 sense of honor and that's it you don't know about him as a father a son a dad or any i mean

00:15:29.680 but odysseus you get the full picture as a husband a father a leader etc right well

00:15:35.720 i i have several responses to that one of that one of them being that you should really take my

00:15:42.680 iliad seminar sometime okay all right we this is this this you need a second book but

00:15:48.140 be careful what you wish for um right no i see what you mean i mean the there's a sort of a

00:15:55.680 a joke among classicists and in fact i there was a scene in my book which i later cut in which i

00:16:03.440 remember having a conversation when i was an undergraduate classics major at the university

00:16:08.480 of virginia a student of jenny strauss clay who's a great authority on homer and particularly the

00:16:13.940 odyssey and she had me and a couple of other students over for dinner one night and we were

00:16:19.720 talking about you know we're sort of jokingly arguing about which do you like better the

00:16:24.880 iliad or the odyssey and you know it was my first exposure to a phenomenon which you are yourself

00:16:31.080 experiencing which is that the world does tend to fall into iliad people or odyssey people rarely

00:16:37.780 both they are starkly different i think the odyssey look the odd the iliad is a poem of death

00:16:43.860 ultimately right it is about death and why death gives life meaning and how death gives meaning to

00:16:54.700 life i would say in a very tiny nutshell that is what the iliad is preoccupied with why we do what

00:17:02.460 we do when we know that we are going to die um and that's certainly true of achilles whatever you

00:17:08.700 think of him he knows that he's going to die he chooses to die and he chooses to die because

00:17:13.800 he wants his life to be glorious the odyssey is a poem of life it is a poem of survival you know

00:17:21.420 it presents a different kind of heroism the heroism of the iliad is the glittering archaic almost

00:17:30.140 medieval heroism of knights in shining armor and the the strange allure of military violence

00:17:40.520 which is a deep part of civilization whether one likes that or not uh there is a thrill

00:17:47.460 to these battle scenes there is a thrill of violence and the iliad grapples with that

00:17:53.880 um the odyssey is a poem of life it's about survival the hero does anything to survive you know it's funny

00:18:02.680 i always joke with my students that the tragedy you never talk about food and tragedy you know nobody

00:18:09.900 ever says oh i think i may have married my mother and do you want to get something to eat because

00:18:16.480 food reminds us of life processes which are inherently sort of comic but the odyssey is

00:18:23.460 filled with food with digestion with people's stomachs that need to be filled you know it's very

00:18:30.580 in a nitty-gritty way obsessed with the mechanics of survival there's so many scenes in which

00:18:37.220 you know odysseus survives yet another shipwreck and is clinging like an octopus homer says to the to

00:18:45.800 a cliff face in order to to stay alive he you know all of the heroes in the iliad have a certain kind

00:18:53.520 of dignity because of the seriousness of the undertaking that they are engaged in the odyssey

00:18:59.880 you know odysseus it is a one of the salient characteristics of this wonderful character

00:19:06.480 odysseus that he's willing to be undignified there is nothing too low for him in order to survive he

00:19:14.180 abases himself he dresses up as a hobo he beats himself with a lash in order to make a disguise convincing 0.94

00:19:22.800 as as a bum he he grovels he begs he dissimulates he goes hungry he gluts himself you know and and he 0.87

00:19:32.920 has a family he's a grown-up look achilles is a young kid basically right but odysseus is a grown-up

00:19:40.780 he has responsibilities he has a family he has a child that he's desperate to get back to and i think

00:19:45.620 for that reason there are ways in which the odyssey can speak to one that are just different

00:19:54.200 from the ways that the iliad can speak to one and it really depends on who you are i have found as i

00:20:00.660 get older uh that the odyssey speaks to me even more than it used to because it is a poem about adulthood

00:20:08.320 about about the realities of life and grappling with them and one of those realities is time and age

00:20:16.200 you know odysseus comes back after 20 years he's a changed person his wife is a changed person his son

00:20:23.280 is a changed person and a lot of the poem is how they deal with that so it feels very vivid and present

00:20:30.080 and modern in a way yeah i think you're honest like i remember enjoying reading the iliad when i was

00:20:35.060 younger now that i i've got kids i look to odysseus right because i can relate to him yes it's a great

00:20:41.260 poem about family i never think of that before when i read it as a graduate student but now i think it

00:20:48.280 is a poem that is obsessed with family and how do you know your own family which of course is a subject

00:20:54.180 i'm interested in for other reasons right well speaking of how do you know your own family like

00:20:58.860 a lot of people don't realize or they forget the odyssey it's a you know it's the titular character

00:21:04.580 odysseus he doesn't even make an appearance in the story until like four or five books in

00:21:09.160 and it's all about his son telemachus who's now a young man trying to find out about his dad

00:21:16.340 what do you think is going on there like why did why was telemachus why did telemachus go on this

00:21:20.960 journey to find out all you know to talk to his dad's old war buddies to find out about his dad

00:21:25.560 well there are a number of reasons why

00:21:27.960 the poem begins not with odysseus but with telemachus the son and i think partly it's to

00:21:36.100 introduce this very overpowering theme in the in the poem about fathers and sons um but all it's a

00:21:44.920 it's a very clever narrative device because we're interested in the odyssey in in odysseus rather

00:21:52.480 right we're interested in odysseus and yet the author holds him back for four whole books when

00:21:58.600 you get a lot about the son who is his character we don't know anything about it so it creates a

00:22:05.140 certain kind of suspense you know everyone's wondering at the beginning of the odyssey where

00:22:09.600 is odysseus is he alive or dead if he's alive how do we get him home if he's dead what's going to

00:22:15.780 happen in ithaca because the poem opens with this sort of crisis on ithaca the king has been away for

00:22:23.020 20 years no one knows if he's coming home if his wife is a widow if she should remarry his son is now

00:22:30.820 grown up should he become the king can he become the king does he have what takes to become the king

00:22:36.180 so the poem very cannily begins with the absence of odysseus as it were in order to make us the audience

00:22:44.120 feel the absence of this great hero and to see what it's like when a great hero isn't around to

00:22:49.880 take care of business but most of all i think it it begins this way to focus our attention on a theme

00:22:55.980 which is sons and fathers and specifically sons looking for fathers um and as i underscore in the

00:23:07.500 book the structure of the odyssey itself underscores the importance of fathers and sons

00:23:14.780 by having the beginning of the poem being about telemachus odysseus's son searching

00:23:21.800 for his father and the end of the poem the last thing that happens to the poem is odysseus now returned

00:23:28.780 home at last looking for his now elderly father and seeking him out and having a reunion with him

00:23:36.580 so so that structure sort of emphasizes how important this father-son uh material is

00:23:44.960 in the poem but at the beginning of the poem there's a plot reason as well for for telemachus

00:23:50.740 to go out searching for information about odysseus which is that there's a crisis he has now reached the

00:23:56.280 age of manhood we want to know if he can become the king poor penelope has been fending off the suitors 1.00

00:24:02.260 for years we need to know if she should marry one of them or still hold off and wait for him so the

00:24:08.980 question of whether odysseus is alive or dead is very pressing as the poem begins and that's why

00:24:16.240 telemachus on the advice of athena disguised as a family friend uh goes off to talk to some of

00:24:24.280 odysseus old war buddies to find out if indeed any information can be gotten about him right but i think

00:24:31.240 it's interesting you you went on your own like those first four books i think they're called the

00:24:34.580 telemachy oftentimes because they're just about telemachas yes talking the telemachy well you went

00:24:40.320 on your own telemachy in the process of writing the book you wouldn't talk to your dad's old

00:24:45.460 colleagues and friends i mean what were you hoping to find out by going on your telemachy well yes i mean

00:24:51.240 i i you know my my personal narrative in the book is designed to kind of mimic the the structure to

00:25:00.600 some extent of the odyssey itself and which i you know go to some lengths to explain so that people will

00:25:08.480 get the the parallels and i end i end my book by doing what telemachy what telemachus does uh which

00:25:18.680 is to seek out some of my father's old friend because you know in many ways this book is a biography of

00:25:23.680 my father i mean it is about how he took my odyssey class and how we went on this odyssey

00:25:28.980 cruise but it's it tries to amount to a kind of a an account of his life and who he was and i got to

00:25:36.560 a certain point when i realized that i to get some crucial information about who he was before i knew

00:25:44.840 him you know before i was born i needed to talk to some old friends just as telemachus did at the

00:25:52.060 beginning of the odyssey and so i sought out uh my uncle my father's older brother who's actually

00:25:59.060 still alive he's now 97 um and my father's oldest friend uh who knew him as a young man when he first

00:26:07.580 started working uh in order to flesh out my own understanding of what my father had been like when

00:26:13.820 he was young and you know i go to great lengths and in my book explaining the significance of two

00:26:21.640 visits that telemachus makes in the beginning of the odyssey first to the elderly king nestor

00:26:27.360 uh who was a war uh comrade of odysseus's um and i describe the encounter between this this son of

00:26:39.780 odysseus and his father's elderly friend and then in book four of the odyssey odysseus goes to meet

00:26:46.280 uh menelaus another hero of the trojan war who's married to helen of troy and in the course of a

00:26:52.320 great feast telemachus learns a lot about odysseus and a lot about life actually and so i i in my book

00:27:01.080 you know i'm very self-consciously obviously uh modeling my visit to my elderly uncle and then

00:27:07.900 uh to my godfather my father's closest friend and his wife in the course of a very lavish dinner and

00:27:14.540 of course i'm i'm invoking these parallels between my trips and the trips you read about in the odyssey

00:27:20.600 and it's just one way that i'm using of trying to underscore the way that you know these ancient works

00:27:29.540 always somehow feel very present and real you know the kinds of experiences that they describe

00:27:36.440 are kinds of experiences in many cases that we have and so yes there is a there is a point in

00:27:43.360 my book where i am very self-consciously being telemachus going on a fact-finding mission i think

00:27:48.640 all like you know i think that theme of sons searching for fathers for some reason i don't

00:27:53.420 know why it is like that's like a drive in a lot of men and i know i've gotten to the age where yeah

00:27:58.500 you have that realization like i don't really know my dad right like he he lived you know 30 years

00:28:04.740 before i came into existence there's a whole part of him i have no clue about and like you said i

00:28:09.820 mean it's almost like he's in there aliens right and yes and do you think you can ever really know

00:28:16.360 like this going back to that theme that you said that it's part of the odyssey can you really know

00:28:19.440 your family yeah well i think that well let me start by saying that you know i was saying before that

00:28:24.400 i think the odyssey is is in many ways an epic about families and one of the phenomena that the

00:28:32.740 odyssey seems to understand by spending so much time building up the character of the young son

00:28:40.160 which can be frustrating you know in my experience to students who want to get right to odysseus

00:28:45.860 but i think homer knows what he's doing because he creates this wonderful character of odysseus son

00:28:51.940 precisely in order to emphasize a theme that's very important which is how well can a child

00:29:00.980 know its own parents you know and one of the things i now think the odyssey is about is how

00:29:09.520 it's going to sound funny is it's about how little children understand their parents marriages

00:29:18.260 you know and so to bring it back to your point i think that it's only when you are an adult yourself

00:29:27.900 or in the case of telemica as a young adult but certainly when you're in your 30s when you get to

00:29:33.920 be the age your father was when your father had a family that you start asking certain questions that

00:29:40.480 you were just literally not capable of asking earlier because you weren't in a position to but

00:29:46.720 when you get to a point in your life when you yourself have children when you start having to make

00:29:51.860 the decisions that a father has to make you start thinking about your father in a different way

00:29:58.240 i'm sure it's true you know for for daughters and mothers right you get to be in the same life

00:30:06.720 zone that they were in and then you start to wonder because you have to make decisions you have to make

00:30:13.700 life choices and then you're in a better position both to appreciate the choices that they made

00:30:20.800 or to question them but i just don't think it occurs to you until you get to a certain point in life

00:30:27.820 to think about your parents in this way because you just don't have the equipment to do it i think it's

00:30:32.900 very natural for men you know to get to a certain age of the early adulthood in your 30s say and you

00:30:44.280 just start thinking about your father in a different way and you sort of you sort of start to wonder

00:30:50.100 well why did they do why did he do what he did instead of something else and you know i i certainly had

00:30:58.520 that experience with my father i was not close to my father until i was in my late 20s um i was always

00:31:05.360 a little intimidated by him and you know he was a kind of imposing figure and being both by temperament

00:31:13.320 and also because he was an american man of a certain era being not inclined to be a big sharer emotionally

00:31:21.320 i was sort of mystified by him for a lot of my life until i was in my 20s and then

00:31:27.900 you know later in my own life i started to think when i had children myself of course i thought a lot

00:31:36.200 about my father and i think it happens to a lot of us and then you think why did he do what he did

00:31:42.000 why did he make those choices you know it just becomes more interesting and more present

00:31:47.220 and less hypothetical than it than those questions were when you were much younger and speaking of

00:31:53.140 trying to know your dad searching for for father son searching for fathers i thought was interesting

00:31:58.920 throughout the book you described your dad i wouldn't say curmudgeon but he's like set in his

00:32:03.040 ways right and he's got like you said he's from an era in america where it's like you know you're stoic

00:32:07.260 you're gritty you don't show weakness etc and then you take him on this cruise and it seems like he opens

00:32:14.220 up and he softens and like he's charming right like he he croons these pop standards for for this

00:32:21.240 the martini glass yeah it's like a completely different person what do you what do you think

00:32:25.760 was going on here and did you know that part of your dad before the cruise well i mean that

00:32:30.680 sort of transformation so to speak you know i knew that my father could be that way i think

00:32:37.420 he didn't get to be that way a lot when we were growing up because he was just raising us one of

00:32:44.860 the things that i'm interested in in the odyssey is this ongoing theme of identity

00:32:51.600 which is also one of the fundamental themes of the odyssey one of the most interesting things about

00:32:58.380 odysseus as a character is how multiplex his identity is he seems to be a different man with

00:33:04.280 different people he's ferocious as a leader he's violent with his enemies he's seductive with

00:33:13.080 attractive young women he's charming when he wants to be he's obstreperous when he wants to be so the

00:33:20.200 odyssey is very interested in this question of you know what is identity what does it mean to be a man

00:33:27.480 do you can you be many things at once does being a man mean you're one thing you know achilles to go

00:33:33.720 back to your earliest comment is sort of a one thing kind of a guy and one of the reasons we love

00:33:40.480 odysseus as a character is that he's so complicated and i mentioned this because it dawned on me when we

00:33:49.660 were on the cruise and i i got to see at great length a side of my father that he did not often

00:33:55.780 let out you know this charming affable relaxed old gentleman whom people just naturally loved you

00:34:06.480 know which was not the dad i was necessarily uh familiar with and it raised in my mind while this

00:34:15.000 was happening the relevance of the odyssey and its interest in identity you know i i realized that my

00:34:22.660 father was like odysseus he had many sides some of which i never got to see that often you know i

00:34:29.320 remember i traveled a lot with my father in his later years he had always been interested in traveling

00:34:35.080 and my mom was doesn't really enjoy traveling and so you know being a husband of his era he never went

00:34:42.360 anywhere because he wouldn't dream of doing anything without my mother so he stayed home

00:34:46.300 and then in the i would say i don't know in the mid-2000s when my father was in his mid-70s i just

00:34:55.520 started taking him everywhere with me when i had a book tour abroad or a literary festival in jerusalem or

00:35:03.380 you know whatever i would just take him we went to south africa we went to london we went to paris we

00:35:08.600 and it was great he was like a kid he really was just so happy to be traveling and i still remember

00:35:14.820 you know but in real life he was kind of gruff and and he hated clothes he hated dressing up he hated

00:35:22.800 fancy restaurants you know and and i still remember a friend of mine in paris had a party a very elegant

00:35:32.080 lady and it was a lot of publishing french publishing people and people kept coming up to me

00:35:39.100 and saying oh your father is so charming and i remember thinking who are they talking about you

00:35:45.320 know so it brought home to me a a sort of a truth that the odyssey understands which is that identity

00:35:53.340 is not a constant or at least it is much more complicated than we think it is and that we can

00:35:59.980 be different people depending on the context that we're in i would never in a million years

00:36:06.680 when i was growing up have described my father as charming and sophisticated you know it's just

00:36:12.800 not in my vocabulary and yet people thought that of him so it's also look it's also a very interesting

00:36:20.760 phenomenon and this is not just about fathers and sons it's about children and parents that

00:36:26.660 we see our parents as our parents all the time and can sometimes forget that other people look at them

00:36:34.740 with different eyes and that they have identities that we don't even dream of because we never have

00:36:41.160 that relationship with them and that was one of the great really strong insights i had from from doing

00:36:49.160 this with my dad yeah and i also think it shows that going on adventures allows you to explore identities

00:36:56.300 you didn't think you had yes right yeah yeah i mean that's you know people say this about travel right

00:37:02.400 you know travel it's such a cliche we don't even pause to think anymore of why it's true that travel

00:37:09.020 expands you you know that's why you do your junior year abroad or whatever and the odyssey is very hip

00:37:15.740 to that right the odyssey understands that the you who trap you know the you that you were before you

00:37:22.960 went on the trip is a different person from the you who returns from the trip and it's something we've

00:37:30.140 all experienced you know when we go away for a long time for the first time i don't care whether

00:37:36.080 it's summer camp or mongolia you know that's why we do this it it it creates a new self and that's

00:37:45.220 why it's so exciting and that's also something that the odyssey has a very deep understanding of

00:37:50.420 yeah but we change when we travel but as you said there's like one of the themes of the odyssey is

00:37:56.100 recognition agnorasis i think that's agnorasis is how you pronounce it agnorus yeah i'm i'm saying

00:38:01.520 how we say how you're in oklahoma agnorasis but when he gets home odysseus gets home um there's

00:38:07.980 these recognition scenes his well his son recognizes him without ever seeing him before really or not

00:38:12.980 remembering him but the the recognition between him and his wife because you said odysseus is sort

00:38:17.680 of like this it's called a family the importance of family and odysseus and penelope have this

00:38:22.220 really strong marriage and odysseus as you said he's you know can be seductive and in fact he was

00:38:27.700 on this island with circe for seven years with she was a goddess beautiful young forever young sex

00:38:34.480 all the time and he was being held captive there but odysseus like the story starts when we entered

00:38:40.660 when he's introduced to us like he's sitting on this island with this goddess sobbing wanting to

00:38:45.500 get back to his mortal wife who's probably 20 she's 20 years older now at this point what what's 0.55

00:38:51.560 going on there well i think you know i've been talking so much about the father son stuff but

00:38:59.000 you know we cannot forget that in a way and i should have mentioned this when i was cataloging

00:39:06.180 the various ways in which the odyssey is sort of the primal text for many kinds of narratives

00:39:11.460 it's also a great love story as hokey as that sounds i mean here is this guy he's a great hero he's

00:39:18.500 one of the great heroes of the trojan war he's a king he's a royal person he's an adventurer he's a

00:39:25.880 you know he's a very sexy guy and and yet there is only one woman for him you know and he has all

00:39:34.240 these women he he spends seven years with calypso he spends a year with circe he women are throwing 1.00

00:39:40.880 themselves at him this darling young princess nausicaa whom he meets when he makes a pit stop at yet

00:39:47.180 another island it has clearly has a crush on him and he sort of has a crush on her as well i think

00:39:53.480 but whatever these dalliances may be it's very clear that there is only one person who satisfies him

00:40:02.320 and one of the great things about the odyssey is it understands something that we can sometimes forget

00:40:10.620 you know every time i go to the gym and i see people frenziedly working on their bodies all the

00:40:16.560 time you know and i think man i wish these people would read the odyssey because it reminds you that

00:40:22.820 ultimately the sexiest thing about people is their minds their personalities you know and it's it's

00:40:29.000 interesting what you brought up before that you know what you were pointing out that calypso is a

00:40:33.920 goddess she will never grow old she will always be fabulously beautiful she is the you know what all

00:40:40.180 these people going to the gym want to be like and yet he doesn't want her he wants so she wants penelope 0.94

00:40:47.760 and even though as calypso reminds him penelope is now 20 years older she's getting gray she's got

00:40:55.880 wrinkles all of that but it doesn't bother him because she is the one who satisfies and satisfies

00:41:01.080 him and the reason that she satisfies him is because he likes her mind and your mind does not

00:41:07.440 get old in the same way that your body does right and the recognition scene between odysseus and

00:41:14.920 penelope at the end of the odyssey was one of the great scenes in world literature i mean it every time

00:41:20.620 you read it it's just totally overwhelming you know is so satisfying because they don't recognize

00:41:28.140 each other physically right remember he's he's been taken on the appearance of a beggar a hobo a bum 0.65

00:41:37.660 in order to infiltrate in secret his palace and so it's not about a physical recognition

00:41:45.400 because of course which i think is a motif in the poem that suggests that a homer understood

00:41:53.140 something very real about life the thing that connects us to people if it's a profound relationship

00:41:58.300 is not the physical stuff or not only the physical stuff because after 20 years you know what you do

00:42:04.700 look like a different person but what connects them and the thing that is recognizable in each of

00:42:12.060 these characters penelope and odysseus to the other is the mind right penelope odysseus ultimately

00:42:19.740 proves who he is to penelope because of something he knows not because of the way he looks and that is

00:42:26.280 so great because that is true you know what binds us to each other is what's in our head not the size of

00:42:35.080 our thighs or our pectoral muscles um and so i just think that it understands that so brilliantly and

00:42:42.580 it's so satisfying at the end um and so it's a great love story ultimately you know he finally gets

00:42:50.760 back to his wife and of course one of the most charming touches in the poem is that the gods

00:42:58.660 themselves sort of recognize you know the importance of this reunion because they delay

00:43:05.040 the dawn so that odysseus and penelope can have that much more time in bed together after all those

00:43:11.100 years which i just think is one of the greatest things but one of the great endings to one of the

00:43:15.700 greatest love stories of all time right i think it's interesting one of your students pointed out that

00:43:19.880 yeah they they have the sort of like this remarriage right and they they spend all the night not having

00:43:25.620 sex but they're just talking yeah right they they had of course they they had sex but then they just

00:43:30.540 spent the night talking which revisites that point that it's not the physicality that makes a strong

00:43:35.660 relationship it's that those that connection that shared story you you have with your loved one the

00:43:40.400 narrative the talk the pillow talk it's not the sex it's the pillow talk that makes them the great

00:43:46.760 couple that they are right yeah and how the recognition scene happened i think it goes back like you

00:43:52.340 you talk about this in your book that you know relationship there's all these like inside jokes

00:43:56.880 or things that only you and your your spouse know about or your partner know about and that's what

00:44:03.260 makes that relationship right and it's like something that your kids will never know about

00:44:06.680 your friends will never know about but it's just between you two and that's what creates those

00:44:12.060 those little signs that create that relationship that strong relationship right i mean i always tell my

00:44:17.540 students think of the thrill that you experience when you're able to guess a friend's password to

00:44:24.080 some website because you know them so well right that you know it's going to be a combination of

00:44:32.020 their dog's name and their sister's birthday or whatever you know that's what it means to really

00:44:37.700 know someone is to be intimate with their mind and it's always satisfying so what did your dad think of

00:44:45.320 the seminar when he was done with it do you think he was changed by the text or do you kind of like

00:44:51.480 stick with what he thought about life well ultimately i mean we did talk about this and some of it is in

00:44:56.580 the book you know i think he appreciated very much and i think one of the things he appreciated about it

00:45:01.060 you know he himself had a he was a research scientist but he did have a kind of late life career after he

00:45:08.440 retired from grumman as a computer science professor and i think he quite liked teaching

00:45:14.900 actually and he liked students and i think one of the transformative things about him was interacting

00:45:20.440 with the students i think he had a lot of respect for them how independent minded they were often how

00:45:26.460 hard they resisted my own interpretations in favor of their own which i think really impressed him

00:45:33.280 you know because a lot of students especially freshmen are intimidated by their professors

00:45:39.060 uh but these were very feisty kids and my father excuse me these were very feisty kids and my father

00:45:47.160 really appreciated that um i think he was fascinated to see me in my professional life which he had never

00:45:55.040 done i mean obviously i'm a writer he reads he read everything i ever published but you know he knew i was a

00:46:02.480 teacher but i think it was sort of very satisfying for him to sort of see me in action um i do think he

00:46:10.980 even though he never really came to love odysseus as a hero i do think he he got a lot out of our

00:46:19.340 discussions of the poem and came to have let's say a grudging appreciation of the odyssey it was very

00:46:25.740 interesting to me because after the seminar was over my father read the iliad for the first time

00:46:35.240 since he was in high school in the 1940s and which i think he told me he had only read in excerpts in

00:46:42.580 high school english or something but after the odyssey seminar where you know we we also talked a lot

00:46:50.800 about homer and homeric technique and you know so my father could sort of come to the iliad with more

00:46:57.840 equipment than he would otherwise have been able to bring to it and he called me up and he said now

00:47:03.880 this poem i love and i think he just responded you know it goes back to what we were saying before

00:47:11.600 about being an odyssey person or an iliad person i think my father's consciousness was formed by two

00:47:19.980 great events in history one of them was the great depression which he grew up in the middle of

00:47:27.280 and you know did not have an easy childhood uh he had a fairly hard scrabble childhood and the

00:47:36.660 the other one being world war ii which really formed him i think as a as a person and so

00:47:43.720 in a certain sense i think the iliad with its with its stark choices and its obsession with

00:47:52.440 the way that war forces moral choices on people and its descriptions of war and its heroics

00:48:01.860 um just made more sense to him ultimately i really think that and so but i was so happy he read it

00:48:11.480 because the reason he read it was because he took the odyssey seminar and i think you know ultimately

00:48:17.780 the iliad just made more sense to him um and so that was something that came out of this experience

00:48:25.240 as well i'm very glad he got that he really responded to it it just sat with him more naturally

00:48:32.340 um i was very happy he had that experience and did your relationship change between you and your

00:48:38.200 father after reading the odyssey together you know the story about sons and fathers reuniting

00:48:42.420 well i mean i no i was close to my father before we did this i mean we we had not been close when i

00:48:51.660 until i was almost 30 um and then things shifted for various reasons that i describe in the book

00:48:59.440 um and so we were already close but of course naturally just because we were traveling together

00:49:07.560 having these experiences together because we did the odyssey seminar together uh i would say i

00:49:16.300 it's not that i became closer to him because i was already close but i knew more about him

00:49:21.780 much more about him than i otherwise would have known partly

00:49:25.240 through his responses to the text you know i mean as i say in the book i'm it's a bit of a spoiler but

00:49:35.020 not really that important i it came it occurred to me at a certain point that one of the reasons he

00:49:41.300 really resisted the charm of odysseus as a character was that odysseus reminded my father

00:49:47.120 of his father-in-law my mother's father who was a famous you know bullshitter and raconteur and

00:49:56.100 fabulous and trickster and you know they didn't get along that well and it just occurred to me

00:50:03.460 halfway through the course that my father really was not particularly interested in succumbing to

00:50:08.880 the charms of odysseus because odysseus reminded him of my grandfather with whom he was often at

00:50:15.100 loggerheads um so you know things like that i just had sort of moments of insight into things about

00:50:22.160 my father through his reactions to the text as he would express them in class discussion and that

00:50:29.380 experience was really

00:50:31.220 unmatchable you know nothing would have given me those insights except the experience that we had

00:50:40.420 which was thinking about the odyssey together so the odyssey really was a vehicle for i would say a

00:50:47.640 really enhanced understanding for me of who my father was well daniel there's a lot more we can

00:50:53.080 talk about but we're gonna let people go get the book so we don't spoil anymore because the ending is

00:50:56.860 fantastic where can people go to find more information about the book in your work well they can

00:51:01.480 start with my website danielmendelson.com um where i have links to this book and my other books

00:51:11.320 um and i hope that there will be many more places where readers can find out about it as the reviews

00:51:19.720 come out that's what i'm hoping for awesome well daniel mendelson thank you so much your time it's been

00:51:25.440 a pleasure oh it's been totally fun for me thank you great questions i really enjoyed the conversation

00:51:30.900 my guest today was daniel mendelson he's the author of a book in odyssey a father a son and an epic

00:51:36.220 it launches september 12th but it's available for pre-order now at amazon.com so if you go there

00:51:40.980 today pre-order it it's going to ship to your door and be at your house september 12th go do it if

00:51:45.680 you love the odyssey you're going to love this book a lot of great insights about the story i'm

00:51:49.960 probably going to read this again just to get those insights and chew on them some more so go check it

00:51:53.880 out in odyssey you can also find out more information about his work at danielmendelson.com

00:51:58.080 check out our show notes at aom.is odyssey where you can find links to resources where you can delve

00:52:02.720 deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more

00:52:17.840 manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you

00:52:21.840 enjoy the show i've gotten something out of it i'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us

00:52:25.020 review on itunes or stitcher helps us out a lot as always thank you for your continued support

00:52:29.580 until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

00:52:32.580 you

The Art of Manliness - September 08, 2017

#337： What Homer's Odyssey Can Teach Us Today

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