#337： What Homer's Odyssey Can Teach Us Today
Episode Stats
Summary
In his new book, "Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic," Daniel Mendelson shares the experience of having his 81-year-old father enroll as a student in the undergrad seminar he taught on the Odyssey one year, and the insights he gleaned about his relationship with his dad by looking at the father-son relationships explored in the epic poem.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast i love many of
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the classic myths and poems of ancient greece my favorite though is the odyssey while on the
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surface it seems to be only an epic adventure if you dig deeper the odyssey can give you insights
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on fatherhood marriage and surviving in a world that's in constant flux my guest today recently
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published a book exploring these themes in the odyssey particularly the themes of fathers and
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sons searching for each other his name is daniel mendelson and he's a classicist essayist and book
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critic and in his latest book in odyssey a father a son and epic daniel shares the experience of
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having his 81 year old father enroll as a student in the undergrad seminar he taught on the odyssey
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one year and the insights he gleaned about his relationship with his dad by looking at the
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father-son relationships explored in the epic poem we begin our conversation with a big picture
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overview the odyssey and why daniel's dad decided to take a seminar on it and then daniel and i
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discuss what we can learn about the relationship between sons and father from odysseus relationship
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with both his son telemachus and his father laertes we then shift to what we can learn from odysseus and
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his wife penelope on forming a strong marriage and how travel can change us and why the odyssey
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becomes more relevant to men when they have families of their own this is a fun podcast filled
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with amazing insights about one of the greatest stories ever told after you listen to it you're
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going to want to check out the show at aom.is slash odyssey you're also going to want to dust
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off your copy of the odyssey itself so you can read it with fresh eyes
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daniel mendelson welcome to the show thanks for having me so you wrote a you just got a new book that's
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come out it's a book about my favorite book the odyssey but it's also a memoir about you and your
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father you're a classics professor and one year you gave a seminar undergraduate seminar on the odyssey
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and your 80 year old father asked to sit in on the seminar before we get to why your dad wanted to
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take your seminar why did you decide to teach a seminar on the odyssey because that's you know that's
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seminars where it's just sort of free flowing there's no real set curriculum there's reading
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discussion was it a work that you spent a lot of time researching and writing about or did you have
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some deeper attachment to it well it's funny because i myself i mean you know as a classic scholar my actual
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specialty is greek tragedy and is not the odyssey but by a kind of funny concatenation of life events i
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i ended up both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student studying the classics sort of
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under the sway of two great scholars who were specialists in different ways in the odyssey so
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it was sort of always haunted by the odyssey i even actually while i'm talking to i remember that
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one of the most influential high school teachers i had a woman who was an english teacher at the high
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school on long island that i went to when i was growing up put the odyssey in my hands she was
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actually a friend of my dad her husband worked with my father and she told me oh if you ever read
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anything you should read the odyssey so the odyssey has always sort of been in my life even though it's
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it was not for a long time my academic specialty and then the reason i was teaching the seminar
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about the odyssey is that i teach at bard college i'm not a full-time professor because i have to
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have time to write and i try to think of courses that are sort of useful to the classics department
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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
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of a seminar for first-year students who were first you know coming to college and focus on one text
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and you know it's essentially a way to teach them how to read as college students and so i just thought
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oh it'd be great to teach the odyssey because it's a text that young people love because it's got
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adventures and monsters and witches and you know it's it's a lot of fun i i think it's probably more
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fun than the iliad say in certain ways and so i just thought okay i'll do a semester-long seminar on
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the odyssey just reading two books per session one session per week a three-hour almost three-hour
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session and just and just teach them really how to read in great detail and so that's how i came to
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to teach that course well then tell us about your dad because your dad i mean i feel like i got to
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know him really well the way you describe him oh good um you know even like you know pronouncing the
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the accent he had coffee that's how my my my in-laws are from back east that's how they say
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coffee coffee um right but tell us about him and did it surprise you that he wanted to sit in on the
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seminar to some extent i mean my father was a research scientist at an aerospace corporation
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grumman aerospace who built the lunar module we were a very aerospace family it was the largest
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employer on long island in the 70s when i was growing up and he was a he had done an undergraduate
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degree in math and was a you know he's a science guy and but he was uh largely self-taught uh in life
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he was a voracious reader from childhood and he had actually been a kind of latin whiz in high school
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in the bronx in the 1940s and so it didn't totally surprise me that my dad would be interested in an
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odyssey course because i knew he had this lingering interest in the classicists and in the classics and
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in fact when i announced to my parents during my first year at the university of virginia that i wanted
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to be a classics major i may have been the only long island boy in history to announce that he wanted to
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be a classicist and to be cheered on and have that announcement welcomed with open arms by his
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parents because they never asked me what are you going to do with this how are you going to make a
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living because my dad had been a latin guy and he thought it was just great that i was studying the
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classics um and my mom did too so i was very lucky in that respect but he was a i mean on the other
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hand i was a little surprised not that he was interested in the odyssey because he had a very
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interested mind and was a great reader but the fact that he wanted to drive three hours every week up to
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bard and sit in a classroom for two hours and 30 minutes with a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds in order
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to learn how to the odyssey that did surprise me at first and when he brought it up i was a little
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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
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it's a lot of driving for one thing but also to just sit as a as a student in a freshman seminar
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and he said yeah actually he did and then i thought okay this could be interesting and of course it turned
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out to be very interesting right where did it fill you with a bit of trepidation you know to know your
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dad like i mean i could see like my parents sat on what i was doing it would kind of make me a little
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nervous well it was i mean i will say that it did affect the dynamic of the classroom i love to teach
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i'm a total ham i love being up in front of a bunch of students that it's always been a total pleasure
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for me but having my father in the classroom did pose a kind of an interesting challenge and as you
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know from reading the book you know we had sort of agreed beforehand that he wasn't going to say
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anything uh you know i said well are you going to be active are you going to be a participant
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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
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believed it because that's sort of the kind of person he was he was not a performer and he didn't
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like to draw attention to himself so going into this the seminar i thought okay he's just going to sit
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there and the kids will stop noticing him and it will be more or less a normal class and then you
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know as you know the the from the very first day of class he got very engaged and was very contentious
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and very vocal so that didn't quite work out the way i thought it was going to be and it was it was
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obviously it's a unique experience in my career as a teacher um i'm never going to have a parent in
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my classroom again and it was actually sort of interesting it was for many reasons it was
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interesting in a comic way first of all because because he was my father there was someone in the
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classroom who had more authority than i did as the students saw it so i noticed as the semester wore on
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that more and more if i asked a question the students would start sort of looking over towards
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my father as if as if he were the professor when they were saying their answers when they were giving
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their answers i thought that was very funny and um but in another way i thought it was interesting
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because he as you know from reading the book he quite often challenged my interpretations of things not
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i don't think because he wanted to be ornery but just because he he was himself and had a different
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take on things i guess and it was like having the opposition leader in a in a legislature like
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students who wanted to contend with the professor's interpretations had someone they could align
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themselves with because remember these are these are first-year students they're 17 they're 18 they
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tend to be intimidated quite often but i think the fact of having a grown-up in the class who was
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often at loggerheads with the professor sort of emboldened them in a way that otherwise would not
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have been the case and i thought that was actually kind of great that's fantastic and we'll talk later
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on a little bit about um the influence that your dad had on the kids that you learned afterwards let's
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talk about the other character in the book which is the odyssey itself hopefully all of our listeners
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have read it or at least familiar with the general plot but looking at things from a big picture
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level what makes the odyssey unique in ancient literature and you know how did it sort of set
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the i don't know what sort of literary devices did it introduce into western literature that we can
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we see in you know shows today that we're watching on amc we like well that that's from
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the odyssey that started there well i'm how long do you have um so first of all the the
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odyssey lays the groundwork for a number of genres the first of these is the adventure narrative
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right a hero goes literally out on on the sea the open sea and has a number of adventures before he gets
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home that is established and defined by the odyssey it's also the first homecoming narrative right
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a person is separated from his family his loved ones and fights all these obstacles to come home
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as you know you know there's a moment when my father and i were on a cruise that recreated the
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voyages of odysseus where we were all sitting around one night over drinks and somebody asked me
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do you think the wizard of oz is an odyssey narrative and i said absolutely you know there's
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no place like home that could be the theme of the of the odyssey but of course there is no place like
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home but it's also nice to stop on the way and meet interesting people uh which is what both
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dorothy gale did and what odysseus does so it's the first homecoming adventure narrative it's the first
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one could almost argue it's the first sort of science fiction narrative a hero you know as
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james t kirk used to say you know boldly goes where no one has gone before to discover
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uh new civilizations right so the odyssey invents creatures cultures new civilizations radically
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different forms of life in order for the hero to encounter them and by uh sort of test himself
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against them uh so in that sense it's certainly the first instance of i guess what we would call
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fantasy literature if not science fiction um i would also say much more broadly speaking
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look the classical past has bequeathed to us these sort of two great epic monuments the iliad and the
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odyssey that stand as a sort of bookends uh that contain all subsequent literature and in with that in
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mind one could certainly say that the odyssey is the first comedy not in the sense that it's ha ha
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funny although there is a tremendous amount of humor in it odysseus is is a great sense of humor
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and there are many moments of really charming uh amusing humor in it but in the sense that it is a
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narrative that takes a hero puts the hero through many trials but gives the hero a happy ending that
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ends with a reunion with a wife and a kind of a a wedding basically right and so in that sense it's
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the model for all comedies just as the iliad is the model for all tragedies and so those are just a
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few of the things uh that come to mind and also obviously uh i left out one of the most important
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ones which is it's also one of the great father-son stories right little boy is separated from his dad
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at birth they come together when the boy is grown up get to know each other get to understand each
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other and then have this great adventure together this great challenge uh which of course is uh to
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take control of their palace and and their city again uh after being uh outcast for many years and so
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it's also one of the great father-son stories as i emphasize in the book well yeah that makes it
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that made your dad sitting in on this class all the more poignant right and yeah one thing i think
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before we got on the show we were talking about how odyssey is my favorite i've read the iliad and
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the odyssey multiple times and i always like go back to the odyssey like i i'm always thinking about
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the odyssey the iliad it's got some really cool battle scenes right where homer describes black blood
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coming out of people's throats and whatever yeah but it leaves me cold like i don't feel like i'm
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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
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know one of the themes in the odyssey is this idea of father i feel like odysseus is he's a
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multifaceted figure you know achilles is like simple like he's angry he has a very sensitive
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sense of honor and that's it you don't know about him as a father a son a dad or any i mean
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but odysseus you get the full picture as a husband a father a leader etc right well
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i i have several responses to that one of that one of them being that you should really take my
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iliad seminar sometime okay all right we this is this this you need a second book but
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be careful what you wish for um right no i see what you mean i mean the there's a sort of a
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a joke among classicists and in fact i there was a scene in my book which i later cut in which i
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remember having a conversation when i was an undergraduate classics major at the university
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of virginia a student of jenny strauss clay who's a great authority on homer and particularly the
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odyssey and she had me and a couple of other students over for dinner one night and we were
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talking about you know we're sort of jokingly arguing about which do you like better the
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iliad or the odyssey and you know it was my first exposure to a phenomenon which you are yourself
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experiencing which is that the world does tend to fall into iliad people or odyssey people rarely
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both they are starkly different i think the odyssey look the odd the iliad is a poem of death
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ultimately right it is about death and why death gives life meaning and how death gives meaning to
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life i would say in a very tiny nutshell that is what the iliad is preoccupied with why we do what
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we do when we know that we are going to die um and that's certainly true of achilles whatever you
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think of him he knows that he's going to die he chooses to die and he chooses to die because
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he wants his life to be glorious the odyssey is a poem of life it is a poem of survival you know
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it presents a different kind of heroism the heroism of the iliad is the glittering archaic almost
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medieval heroism of knights in shining armor and the the strange allure of military violence
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which is a deep part of civilization whether one likes that or not uh there is a thrill
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to these battle scenes there is a thrill of violence and the iliad grapples with that
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um the odyssey is a poem of life it's about survival the hero does anything to survive you know it's funny
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i always joke with my students that the tragedy you never talk about food and tragedy you know nobody
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ever says oh i think i may have married my mother and do you want to get something to eat because
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food reminds us of life processes which are inherently sort of comic but the odyssey is
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filled with food with digestion with people's stomachs that need to be filled you know it's very
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in a nitty-gritty way obsessed with the mechanics of survival there's so many scenes in which
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you know odysseus survives yet another shipwreck and is clinging like an octopus homer says to the to
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a cliff face in order to to stay alive he you know all of the heroes in the iliad have a certain kind
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of dignity because of the seriousness of the undertaking that they are engaged in the odyssey
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you know odysseus it is a one of the salient characteristics of this wonderful character
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odysseus that he's willing to be undignified there is nothing too low for him in order to survive he
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abases himself he dresses up as a hobo he beats himself with a lash in order to make a disguise convincing
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as as a bum he he grovels he begs he dissimulates he goes hungry he gluts himself you know and and he
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has a family he's a grown-up look achilles is a young kid basically right but odysseus is a grown-up
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he has responsibilities he has a family he has a child that he's desperate to get back to and i think
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for that reason there are ways in which the odyssey can speak to one that are just different
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from the ways that the iliad can speak to one and it really depends on who you are i have found as i
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get older uh that the odyssey speaks to me even more than it used to because it is a poem about adulthood
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about about the realities of life and grappling with them and one of those realities is time and age
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you know odysseus comes back after 20 years he's a changed person his wife is a changed person his son
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is a changed person and a lot of the poem is how they deal with that so it feels very vivid and present
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and modern in a way yeah i think you're honest like i remember enjoying reading the iliad when i was
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younger now that i i've got kids i look to odysseus right because i can relate to him yes it's a great
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poem about family i never think of that before when i read it as a graduate student but now i think it
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is a poem that is obsessed with family and how do you know your own family which of course is a subject
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i'm interested in for other reasons right well speaking of how do you know your own family like
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a lot of people don't realize or they forget the odyssey it's a you know it's the titular character
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odysseus he doesn't even make an appearance in the story until like four or five books in
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and it's all about his son telemachus who's now a young man trying to find out about his dad
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what do you think is going on there like why did why was telemachus why did telemachus go on this
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journey to find out all you know to talk to his dad's old war buddies to find out about his dad
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the poem begins not with odysseus but with telemachus the son and i think partly it's to
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introduce this very overpowering theme in the in the poem about fathers and sons um but all it's a
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it's a very clever narrative device because we're interested in the odyssey in in odysseus rather
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right we're interested in odysseus and yet the author holds him back for four whole books when
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you get a lot about the son who is his character we don't know anything about it so it creates a
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certain kind of suspense you know everyone's wondering at the beginning of the odyssey where
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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
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happen in ithaca because the poem opens with this sort of crisis on ithaca the king has been away for
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20 years no one knows if he's coming home if his wife is a widow if she should remarry his son is now
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grown up should he become the king can he become the king does he have what takes to become the king
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so the poem very cannily begins with the absence of odysseus as it were in order to make us the audience
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feel the absence of this great hero and to see what it's like when a great hero isn't around to
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take care of business but most of all i think it it begins this way to focus our attention on a theme
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which is sons and fathers and specifically sons looking for fathers um and as i underscore in the
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book the structure of the odyssey itself underscores the importance of fathers and sons
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by having the beginning of the poem being about telemachus odysseus's son searching
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for his father and the end of the poem the last thing that happens to the poem is odysseus now returned
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home at last looking for his now elderly father and seeking him out and having a reunion with him
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so so that structure sort of emphasizes how important this father-son uh material is
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in the poem but at the beginning of the poem there's a plot reason as well for for telemachus
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to go out searching for information about odysseus which is that there's a crisis he has now reached the
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age of manhood we want to know if he can become the king poor penelope has been fending off the suitors
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for years we need to know if she should marry one of them or still hold off and wait for him so the
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question of whether odysseus is alive or dead is very pressing as the poem begins and that's why
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telemachus on the advice of athena disguised as a family friend uh goes off to talk to some of
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odysseus old war buddies to find out if indeed any information can be gotten about him right but i think
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it's interesting you you went on your own like those first four books i think they're called the
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telemachy oftentimes because they're just about telemachas yes talking the telemachy well you went
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on your own telemachy in the process of writing the book you wouldn't talk to your dad's old
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colleagues and friends i mean what were you hoping to find out by going on your telemachy well yes i mean
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i i you know my my personal narrative in the book is designed to kind of mimic the the structure to
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some extent of the odyssey itself and which i you know go to some lengths to explain so that people will
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get the the parallels and i end i end my book by doing what telemachy what telemachus does uh which
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is to seek out some of my father's old friend because you know in many ways this book is a biography of
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my father i mean it is about how he took my odyssey class and how we went on this odyssey
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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
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a certain point when i realized that i to get some crucial information about who he was before i knew
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him you know before i was born i needed to talk to some old friends just as telemachus did at the
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beginning of the odyssey and so i sought out uh my uncle my father's older brother who's actually
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still alive he's now 97 um and my father's oldest friend uh who knew him as a young man when he first
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started working uh in order to flesh out my own understanding of what my father had been like when
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he was young and you know i go to great lengths and in my book explaining the significance of two
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visits that telemachus makes in the beginning of the odyssey first to the elderly king nestor
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uh who was a war uh comrade of odysseus's um and i describe the encounter between this this son of
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odysseus and his father's elderly friend and then in book four of the odyssey odysseus goes to meet
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uh menelaus another hero of the trojan war who's married to helen of troy and in the course of a
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great feast telemachus learns a lot about odysseus and a lot about life actually and so i i in my book
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you know i'm very self-consciously obviously uh modeling my visit to my elderly uncle and then
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uh to my godfather my father's closest friend and his wife in the course of a very lavish dinner and
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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
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
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
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
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
00:50:31.220
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