00:05:40.780But I mean, what this, I think is interesting,
00:05:42.380all this interest in the Odyssey because of the movie.
00:05:45.360I mean, it just goes to show how timeless this story is.
00:05:49.600And you make the case that it's a very American story.
00:05:53.140And we'll talk about that here in a bit.
00:05:54.660But what's interesting, you've been doing this for decades.
00:05:58.500You're writing about American political life.
00:06:00.780you actually started your career writing about politics with the odyssey as well so i mean
00:06:06.580what's been the draw at looking at american political life through this 3 000 year old
00:06:11.800epic poem why do you keep coming back to it again and again yeah well yeah thanks that's a great
00:06:17.160question because it's something i've been of course thinking a lot about in the last
00:06:19.980couple of months as i was writing this book really i mean it's not merely coincidental
00:06:25.660of course, that I wrote and now published this book just days after the Nolan film,
00:06:31.140I was very much anticipating that there would be a lot of discussion about the Odyssey coming out
00:06:36.200of the film. I haven't been disappointed in that respect. And since I did, in fact,
00:06:40.800not just the early part of my career, but in graduate school, I did a deep dive study of
00:06:45.660the Odyssey with a great classicist at the University of Chicago, David Green, the late,
00:06:49.980really great Irish scholar of antiquity, David Green, great translator of a whole vast range of
00:06:56.800Greek texts. And it was one of those great University of Chicago courses where you spend
00:07:00.720the entire, I think it was actually two terms just with one book. And so we did a very kind of
00:07:06.700painstaking, slow, very close read of the Odyssey. And I really got to know that text quite well
00:07:12.500during those years that I was in Chicago. And then when I departed from Chicago, I went to
00:07:17.820study political philosophy at Rutgers University, the odyssey really stuck with me. And as I did
00:07:23.840the kind of the preparation for the exam in political philosophy, which is really kind of
00:07:29.120a compressed great books curriculum, really is what political philosophy, particularly passing
00:07:35.080the comprehensive exams in political philosophy at that time, at least, I was just seeing the
00:07:40.120odyssey everywhere in all of the major works that we would think about as the great books.
00:07:44.940And this shouldn't surprise us, of course, because the Western tradition is a kind of conversation with preceding authors and those conversations get built author by author and each author in some ways responding to interacting with previous authors.
00:07:58.800That's what makes it a tradition. It's not just this author, that author, that author. It's a conversation and it's a debate.
00:08:04.660And so it's not surprising then that a foundational text like the Odyssey appeared everywhere.
00:08:10.220And so my dissertation was really on the Odyssey as a work of political philosophy, which might seem to some somewhat odd, but I think it has a very philosophic dimension as we'll talk about. And then the way that it was taken up and interpreted and reinterpreted in a long tradition.
00:08:25.800And I got to kind of modern times, but I didn't take that story to America.
00:08:32.360And that's kind of what I always wanted to do.
00:08:34.780But you have to when you're writing a dissertation, you always have to sort of say, I got to finish this thing and get out of graduate school.
00:08:39.880So I always wanted to come back and write a kind of subsequent set of chapters, I guess, in which I would talk about the Odyssey in America.
00:08:46.860And so this confluence of the 250th celebration of the Declaration of Independence and America's birthday and the film coming out seemed to me to be the perfect occasion finally to go back and do what I kind of wanted to do roughly 30 years ago.
00:09:02.040I mean, in the book, you say, you make the claim that the Odyssey, this Bronze Age Greek story, is the most American of text.
00:09:13.120Broad brush and then we can get into the details as we go on our conversation.
00:09:16.660Well, yeah, I might phrase it a little bit differently that if we look in some ways to where do we see some of what I regard as the most foundational kind of dynamic in the Odyssey.
00:09:31.980Many different readers might take a different set of lessons and dynamics from the text.
00:09:36.460But for me, a main focus has always been the kind of, you could say, the divided character
00:09:42.480of Odysseus as a figure who maybe he doesn't really want to go out and, you know, there
00:09:48.560are stories that he didn't want to go to Troy, that he tried to avoid military service.
00:09:52.320Of course, when he leaves Troy after the end of the Trojan War, he wants to get home.
00:09:56.980But all along the way, there are these constant encounters with all of these fantastical characters and creatures and beasts and gods.
00:10:06.540And some of that is portrayed in the film, of course, some of which is quite horrible.
00:10:10.680And the film portrays those really with great effect, these horrible figures like Cyclops and the Scylla and Charybdis.
00:10:18.460But some of these are really enchanting for Odysseus.
00:10:21.500And some of these are extremely tempting to him.
00:10:24.260He does try to throw himself over the side of the ship when he hears the siren song.
00:10:29.400And the siren song is an offer of knowledge, the offer to know everything that occurs everywhere,
00:10:40.320And this is something that tempts Odysseus to the point, really, without realizing it,
00:10:44.680that he would meet his death, he would meet his demise if he had been successful in pulling
00:10:48.960himself off of the ropes that bind him to the mast.
00:10:51.700And throughout his journey home, there are these constant temptations to be more or potentially be less than human, to encounter the strange and unusual and fantastical.
00:11:06.020In other words, that yearning and longing that I think all of us know to set out and discover and encounter that which is yet unknown to us, something that's entirely new to us.
00:11:19.960And I think when we begin to think about the character traits that define Americans, we would say this has to be one of the primary ways we would describe Americans from the very start, those who left their home countries and bravely and quite in some ways madly got onto ships that could barely float.
00:11:39.600And these people were extraordinarily brave and they were striking out for a new world and for a vista that they didn't know.
00:11:47.860They couldn't yet anticipate what they would encounter.
00:11:50.640And once they get there, they begin to spread out and they move and they go further west.
00:11:56.020So this dimension of Odysseus, I think, is really profoundly visible to us and something we can all recognize in what it is to be an American.
00:12:04.440And at the same time, of course, when those wayfarers came over the ocean and come to this new world, they're not merely seeking adventure and to boldly go where no man has gone before.
00:12:18.140They're also seeking to make a home and to settle down.
00:12:22.000So you have pioneers and settlers, and they're often the same person.
00:12:25.740And to become people with roots and traditions and to deeply commit themselves to place and people.
00:12:33.100And this too is, of course, a profoundly Odyssean element that, of course, Odysseus wants to achieve his homecoming return to Ithaca. And he goes through these great tests and these great challenges ultimately in order to return to Penelope, to Telemachus, to Ithaca.
00:12:49.360And I think that kind of paradox and tension of longing for more, longing for something different, longing for the frontier, for the undiscovered territory, and longing for home is, it's of course a profoundly human tension and paradox, but I think it is especially keenly defining of what it is to be an American.
00:13:14.020And what's interesting is a 19th century colleague of yours, French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, he noticed that same tension when he came in toward America back in the early 19th century.
00:13:28.260Americans have both this restless desire to move and to get better, but then also this desire to establish roots in a community.
00:13:36.660For those who aren't familiar with Tocqueville's Democracy in America, what were some of his observations about the American personality?
00:13:43.620Yeah. So now we're talking about a 700 page book about America. But I think, you know,
00:13:48.860as Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University has described it, both the best book about
00:13:52.540democracy and the best book ever written about America. I think that's entirely accurate.
00:13:58.140Tocqueville was amazed and stunned and really was in a kind of state of wonderment at what he called
00:14:05.000the restlessness of Americans. In French, it's enquête. It kind of means inability to be still,
00:14:11.220Like just the inability, the lack of capacity of being at rest, of being satisfied, of being not just quiet, but at rest.
00:14:21.320And this he contrasted, of course, with his native France and arguably with the kind of aristocratic world that he was coming from, in which one's status and one's position in society was a matter of birthright.
00:14:35.600And Tocqueville knew this well. His name means literally of Tocqueville, de Tocqueville.
00:14:39.180he is of the estate and of the family of this aristocratic line. And so he knew from the very
00:14:47.280youngest age possible that he was an heir of this aristocratic status. And therefore there was
00:14:54.320nothing he could do or not do that would change his position, just as someone who's born to a0.63
00:15:00.500peasant couldn't change their status or condition, no matter how hard they might work or how little
00:15:05.940they might work, one was what one was born to be. Now, coming to America, of course, and this is
00:15:13.140something we know very well, our birthright is not a guarantor or in any way an indicator of who we
00:15:19.700are and what position in life we will hold, what jobs we will have, how far we will go, how high
00:15:25.740we will rise, how low we will fall. And so coming to America, he encounters this new civilization,
00:15:31.980which is for him sort of, you know, the people look European that he's encountering, but they0.95
00:15:38.800are completely opposite to the European world he comes from. They are driven. They are constantly0.76
00:15:43.940kind of in a state of active engagement. They're always striving. They always see that if they
00:15:50.660don't get ahead, somebody will pass them. You're in a race by simply birthright of being an American
00:15:57.460and not to run that race in some ways is not an option.
00:16:01.420And so there's an openness to America that was striking to him.
00:16:05.820And again, he calls this restlessness.
00:16:08.340But he also, in really one, I think, one of the most important passages of democracy in
00:16:14.260America very early on, and a passage I love because he's writing about my native home,
00:16:19.580New England, so I grew up in Connecticut, he's writing about what he sees as the kind
00:16:25.060of the form of democracy that he really comes to admire and praise. And that form of democracy is,
00:16:31.360you could say, it's very based in a place, in a small place, the New England township.
00:16:37.520It's centered on the town square. When they talk about town hall meetings, it's not a CNN
00:16:42.580episode. It's an actual meeting of people that come together. He talks about trust and mutual
00:16:49.540knowledge and a kind of shared belief that we share a common destiny and therefore we're invested in
00:16:55.740the future with each other. And this is kind of, you know, in some ways you could say he describes
00:17:00.480a form of democracy that is at least again in tension with this description of democracy as a
00:17:07.520kind of restless pursuit of something else, something better, something out of reach. And
00:17:14.920again, I think he captures a real quality about our experience as Americans in which both of these
00:17:21.720aspects of our democratic life at various points, maybe sometimes one more, one less,
00:17:27.580but both of these are very recognizable to us. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think a lot of
00:17:32.340Americans, when they think about what it means to be American, they might think of images of people
00:17:37.600on the open road. They might think of books like, you know, Jack Kerouac's On the Road,
00:17:42.220bold explorers but then also you start thinking about norman rockwell illustrations of small
00:17:49.020communities where everyone or you think about mayberry what's the name of that show the uh
00:17:53.620oh andy griffith andy griffith show like that's america there are these two competing drives but
00:17:58.640they're both american yes i think that's right and i i i would you know i would underscore that
00:18:04.900while there are certainly individuals who might embody one of these more than others
00:18:09.640I think if we kind of look within, many of us, maybe most of us could say we value both of these qualities as kind of paradigmatic aspects of being an American.
00:18:21.960And I want to underscore, you know, this book is called American Odyssey.
00:18:25.740I think you can see these qualities in any human being, in any human society.
00:18:29.700But I do think I've traveled a lot, just got back from a long two-month trip to Japan and across Europe.
00:18:35.880And I just think that these qualities are, especially in this kind of tense and interestingly dynamic way, they're especially features of an American life in ways that I see not quite as intense in other cultures and civilizations.
00:18:52.860And Tocqueville, in addition to noticing this restlessness and this energy and this ambition and this drive and their people are constantly building houses and moving out before they finish them, starting gardens and like renting it out before things even start growing.
00:19:10.040He also noticed that along with this drive and this ambition, Americans were really unhappy at the same time.
00:19:18.520Yeah. Yeah. So this condition of being restless or enquête, that word also expresses, I think, again, what we might associate with restlessness, a kind of discontent. And that discontent, of course, can be generative. When you're discontent, it means you recognize that there's something more that could be done, that maybe you need to work harder at this aspect of your life or you need to pursue that part of your job with a little bit more vigor.
00:19:46.440And so this discontent is a source of a lot of the dynamism and energy of America.
00:19:51.500And this is something that Tocqueville recognizes.
00:19:54.140But discontentment also has that feature of, we could say, almost the psychological condition
00:19:59.960of being ill at ease, of being anxious, of being worried about what one might be doing.
00:20:07.780And when this is a constant feature of life, and not just an occasional feature of life,
00:20:12.560but a constant future of life, this becomes a really profound burden. And, you know, I've taught
00:20:17.740at some really excellent universities. I'm at Notre Dame now. I was at Georgetown. I've been
00:20:22.580at Princeton. And I would say that what Tocqueville describes as the restlessness or
00:20:27.620inquietude of the American is you can see it in the lives of the students at these kinds of
00:20:34.720institutions where you might think if you're not in these institutions, you might think,
00:20:38.020oh, these kids have it made. They got into these great schools. Their careers are made.
00:20:41.620And if anything, they're some of the most discontent, anxious young people you would ever encounter because they feel this drive and this worry and concern.
00:20:51.020Like if they're not getting ahead, someone else in their institution or someone else at a competing institution might be getting ahead.
00:20:57.520So now Tocqueville says, now imagine this restlessness, which humans have known forever, right?
00:21:02.480Augustine writes about the restless heart that we all have to know and to love God.
00:21:07.000but imagine a whole civilization that's built upon that rest upon this restlessness and he says this
00:21:14.340is a source of deep unhappiness that these americans are constantly in a state of worry
00:21:19.760and fretfulness and anxiety in a way that ultimately may not be terribly healthy for them
00:21:25.060all right let's bring this back to odysseus so you make the case that odysseus can be a symbol
00:28:17.720How do you see that temptation play out in, let's say, American life in the 21st century between those two?
00:28:24.440Yeah. Well, I mean, I think anyone listening might already have said, yeah, I recognize that.
00:28:29.800I mean, we certainly everywhere we turn today, we can see that temptation to be less than human.
00:28:34.920And I assume your podcast is in many ways an effort to correct that, especially young men who might enjoy certain pharmaceuticals a bit too much.
00:28:44.060You know, the pervasiveness of marijuana today is just one of them.
00:28:47.720that kind of zoned out quasi-Lotus-like existence based on how much I smell it in the air just
00:28:54.160walking around the average American city. And any time of day, it seems like there's a lot of people
00:28:59.040who are kind of hooked on Lotus. And then there are other forms of this, of course, which we,
00:29:03.620you know, we could say would be especially young men's addiction to video games, pornography,
00:29:09.560or all of our addiction to these little screens that we scroll on constantly for the little
00:29:14.640dopamine hit that it gives us. So we are in a way struggling today, of course, with that temptation
00:29:21.360in ways that maybe aren't as dramatic as the lotus, the island of the lotus eaters. But the
00:29:27.860very lack of drama in some ways is maybe even more problematic because it's so pervasive that many of
00:29:33.900us don't even recognize the extent to which we are succumbing to these kind of bestial temptations.
00:29:40.020And of course, there are, on the other hand, those temptations to be, in a sense, more than
00:29:44.080human. And I think here we might seem to enter a little bit more into the realm of science fiction,
00:29:49.760efforts to prolong life, potentially indefinitely, often under the rubric of transhumanism.
00:29:57.280So efforts, especially to begin to manipulate our DNA, manipulate genetic splicing, all kinds of
00:30:04.160possible ways that we may be able to overcome what we see as this kind of, this horrible,
00:30:09.660or at least maybe some people see as this horrible fact of our mortality,
00:30:13.820is becoming more and more no longer the stuff of science fiction, but increasingly the stuff
00:30:19.720of science today. And I think in the future, human beings are going to face the really
00:30:24.540dramatic question. If we survive the AI apocalypse, we may be faced with the kind of
00:30:30.760transhumanist apocalypse, which is to say the decision of whether or not to engage in the kind
00:30:37.020of scientific advances that may make us effectively immortal. And so the Odyssey is a text, you know,
00:30:43.980long before some of these particular temptations, but already laid out what those temptations look
00:30:49.280like. And Odysseus, he was holding the line as best he could. Like he really felt this pull to
00:30:56.300be human and he was doing all he could to remain human. Yeah, but you know, he's not perfect. And
00:31:02.540I, of course, don't want to say, suggest that he's perfect. Homer certainly gives us ample
00:31:07.560evidence that he is, like all of us, an imperfect human being. So, for example, the film doesn't
00:31:12.580portray this, but he strays from his wife. Now, this, of course, in the more patriarchal times
00:31:18.360in which his writing is not quite the sensational news that it would have been then. He sleeps
00:31:23.720either voluntarily or involuntarily with several goddesses on his journey home, Circe and Calypso.
00:31:29.020So we are at least to understand that to some extent it's under duress, but he may not have
00:31:34.500entirely minded it. But importantly, especially with Cersei in the film, again, she's portrayed
00:31:39.960as rather this kind of harpy, kind of bitter figure who really, really hates the men, maybe
00:31:46.000just hates men. And they want to get out of there as quickly as they can. In the text, Cersei, it0.55
00:31:52.220turns out after she turns the men into pigs, and then she's forced by Odysseus to turn them back,
00:31:56.680she becomes a great hostess and she entertains them for an entire year and odysseus is so charmed
00:32:04.680by her and maybe he is put under a kind of spell or maybe just the spell of a beautiful woman
00:32:09.340he forgets home and has to be reminded by his men you know don't don't you want to go home
00:32:15.540right isn't it time for us to leave it's been a whole year we've been on this island
00:32:18.860and it's a beautiful island and she's quite a wonderful hostess wonderful food and it's a very
00:32:24.220a comfortable place. And so here again, I think we see a moment in which Odysseus is tempted
00:32:29.780to forget home, to live with a goddess, potentially to be like a god. And all of us,
00:32:36.780even a figure as extraordinary and heroic as Odysseus, and who does retain over a very long
00:32:44.140time his commitment to return home, he can be drawn by these temptations of that which would
00:32:49.620take him beyond and away from home. This is why I think this tension that I think the Odyssey
00:32:55.320portrays is so vivid and alive for those of us today in modern America. So part of his journey
00:33:03.220home, he has to go to the underworld. He has to learn something there, which is kind of weird
00:33:08.620because he's kind of being godlike. He's summoning the dead to have a conversation with them. And he
00:33:15.140does a sacrifice, spills some blood, and then the spirits start drinking the blood and he gets to
00:33:19.320talked to his mom, talked to some other people.
00:33:21.340Then he talks to Achilles, the great warrior in the Iliad who died.
00:34:51.680And, you know, you could say here you have like the two opposite poles of what it is
00:34:55.980to constitute a form of heroism represented in the figures of Odysseus and Achilles.
00:35:01.440And now imagine you get to meet the two of them talking to each other in the underworld
00:35:07.040into which Odysseus has descended, and now he's going to encounter the spirit, right,
00:35:12.120the post-death spirit of Achilles, and have a conversation with him. And that conversation is
00:35:18.260really, it's just an extraordinary moment in which Odysseus begins by, in a sense, praising Achilles
00:35:24.720for all the things that were really important to Achilles when he was alive. We remember Achilles
00:35:28.980stayed in a tent for months out of protest that he was not being honored, and he was not being
00:35:36.540given sufficient honor, in this case by Agamemnon and his perception of the other Greeks, withholding
00:35:42.060honor, that if he was going to die for the sake of this cause, he above all wanted to be remembered
00:35:48.340and honored as someone who was a great warrior. That if you're going to, you know, in his case,
00:35:54.120if you're going to die young, if you're going to lead a short life, it's predicted he can
00:35:57.780choose a short life if he fights, but that short life will be one filled with glory and one in
00:36:03.740which he will be honored. That's one choice he has. Or he could live a long life without honor,
00:36:10.440without glory, stay out of the battle, and avoid the kind of dangers and perils of warfare.
00:36:16.780And in choosing ultimately to re-enter the war after the death of his friend at the hands of
00:36:23.900Hector, in a sense, he seems to choose the short and glorious life. He seems to choose
00:36:29.200of the two options, I will be someone who will be willing to die for the sake of this,
00:36:34.980to be remembered always as this great figure, this great warrior. Well, now here he is in the
00:36:39.820underworld and Odysseus comes down with some news. He says, look, you've been down here for
00:36:44.520a few years, presumably, and stories have now been circulating of your glory. You are honored
00:36:51.160above all of the dead. You hold this extraordinary place, this place of great significance and glory
00:36:57.780in the minds of both the living and the dead and all glory to you, Achilles. And Achilles now,
00:37:05.100rather than saying, this is exactly what I wanted, rather than you might expect him to say,
00:37:09.640yes, this is what I had desired. If I was going to have a short life, I wanted to have a glorious
00:37:13.960life. He says, now having lived or let's say not lived in the underworld for some years, he says,
00:37:20.360I wish I had chosen otherwise. These are the words he says, more or less, almost verbatim.
00:37:25.760I would prefer the life of a slave in the world above than to be the most glorious king
00:37:32.580of the underworld. He would prefer a life of complete indignity and complete obscurity
00:37:39.160to be a slave to another behind a plow in a field rather than enjoying the glory that he now
00:37:47.120has attained. Now, this is a particularly significant moment because not only, of course,
00:37:51.440is Odysseus now hearing from the spirit of Achilles how awful life in the underworld or
00:37:59.460existence in the underworld is, according to Achilles. But Odysseus has yet to be offered
00:38:07.080the possibility of immortality. This only happens later. So as then Odysseus continues his journey
00:38:15.060with, in his mind, with this retort by Achilles, we know or we learn as we read through this text
00:38:23.000that Odysseus is going to have the possibility of not having to go into the underworld,
00:38:28.280that the demigoddess Calypso will offer him immortality. The fact that he turns down1.00
00:38:34.480immortality already is stunning, just the mere fact that he does. But now knowing that the fact
00:38:40.660he turns down immortality, having heard the words of Achilles should fill us with a kind of awe.
00:38:45.660And I think the poet wants us to discover this kind of after the fact. The story of the underworld
00:38:51.400occurs in the book before his journey and time with Calypso. But in terms of the story,
00:38:58.880we only learn about it afterwards, after we hear about his time with Calypso. So I think the
00:39:05.400contrast between these two heroic figures couldn't be more strongly drawn that it turns out
00:39:13.060what Achilles thought he was choosing, he himself comes to regret and in some ways diminishes him
00:39:19.680as a hero in retrospect. Whereas Odysseus, knowing fully what awaits him in the underworld,
00:39:27.640nevertheless chooses to remain immortal in order to return to the side of Penelope and to the home
00:39:34.080of Ithaca. And I think in some ways it elevates his heroism. In some ways you could say not only
00:39:38.880are Odysseus and Achilles kind of contrasting forms of heroes, but the Odyssey and the Iliad
00:39:44.460are kind of competing epics in a way, even if they're both written by this figure Homer.
00:39:50.120In a way, the Odyssey is a kind of commentary on the Iliad in which the heroism of Odysseus
00:39:57.220isn't just his intelligence. It's his ability to accept the mortal condition with full knowledge
00:40:04.460of what awaits him. What do you think 21st century Americans can take away from that?
00:40:11.000Well, again, I think we are constantly being faced with the kinds of temptations that draw us away
00:40:18.860from our limited condition as human beings. And again, I mean, the most radical form of this,
00:40:24.760of course, would be life extension, forms of transhumanism, the kind of technological
00:40:29.700interventions in our lives, that one of the things that seems to me that the story of the
00:40:35.200Odyssey indicates is that we, in a sense, are most human when we can come to reconcile ourselves
00:40:41.580with and even embrace our condition as limited and mortal creatures. And I think this is going to be,
00:40:48.760you know, already is a topic of debate and conversation, and at least the great Western
00:40:53.240tradition that we are heirs of seems very much to teach us that we are most human when we remain
00:40:59.400committed. Of course, in the case of Odysseus, remain committed to those whom we love and the
00:41:05.820limits that we place upon ourselves in order to be with those with whom we love. Thus, to be
00:41:11.600committed to home, to place, to family, to our communities. It may be limiting in terms of what
00:41:17.400we might do and what we might be able to achieve and the various adventures we might have as
00:41:22.380individuals. And yet we are most human when we embrace the very things that in some ways you
00:41:28.260could say somewhat bind and even limit us in what it is we think we can achieve.
00:41:33.120And it can be heroic. We're still talking about Odysseus 3,000 years later.
00:41:37.080I think this is the deepest way in which Odysseus demonstrates his heroism. We might think,
00:41:42.000okay, it's that scene. It's at the end of the movie. It's at the end of the book. He confronts
00:41:45.720the suitors. There's this great battle. He's able to defeat hundreds or several hundred suitors,
00:41:51.280almost single-handedly and yet that's not the most heroic thing he does the most heroic thing
00:41:56.060he does is to leave calypso's island arguably all right so odysseus makes it back to ithaca
00:42:01.120after it took a took a while a lot of detours along the way what happens to him and after he
00:42:06.880kills the suitors and reunites with penelope what happens to him does he settle down and relish
00:42:12.260being back home what's the the sequel to the odyssey well of course it ends with the reconciliation
00:42:19.640of Odysseus and Penelope. So it really is a marvelous ending to what has been a very long
00:42:26.680story of violence, death, and suffering. But then that's where the book ends. And immediately,
00:42:33.040people who read the book and people who write about the book begin to reflect and ponder what
00:42:38.700happens next, what happens particularly to a character like Odysseus, who has seen so much
00:42:44.800of the world and has experienced so many things. And already very early on, shortly, you could say
00:42:51.460shortly after the text becomes widely circulated, people begin imagining, well, he couldn't stay
00:42:56.980there. He would have wanted to go forth and have new adventures. And Tiresias predicts he will have
00:43:02.840to leave home to assuage the anger of Poseidon, but perhaps he comes back after that, or perhaps
00:43:09.600he continues his journey. And one thing that I certainly studied in my dissertation and which
00:43:15.280one could continue to read a lot of kind of imaginary sequels to the Odyssey is that many,
00:43:21.700many authors imagine that Odysseus departs again in order to explore new, including, of course,
00:43:27.780Dante, who pictures and describes the post-Odyssey journey of Odysseus past the rocks of Gibraltar,
00:43:36.660past what are called the pillars of Hercules in antiquity, and even reaches the foot of the
00:43:42.680mountain of purgatory, attempts to ascend it and is struck down at that point by God. So there's a
00:43:49.020long after history of Odysseus' restlessness again coming to the fore, and I think keeps alive this
00:43:55.700interesting question of, you know, is Odysseus at home when he reaches home, or is his restless
00:44:00.960the spirit finally insatiable and does he kind of continue to to go forth again and be the explorer
00:44:06.960yeah tennyson wrote a poem about yes you know uses ulysses he talks about here he says not
00:44:13.280fondness for my son nor reverence for my aged father nor penelope's claim to the joys of love
00:44:18.680could drive out of my mind the lust to experience the far-flung world and the failings and felicities
00:44:24.160of mankind so he still had that drive and i just love how the poem ends he says come my friends
00:44:28.820tis not too late to seek a newer world push off and setting well in order smite the sounding
00:44:33.500furrows for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all western stars until
00:44:38.640i die to strive to seek to find and not to yield so tennyson imagines you know yeah he still has
00:44:45.740that wanderlust he's gonna he's gonna get home but he's not gonna be happy and he's gonna go
00:44:49.220find something else to do right you know it's really interesting so of course tennyson is here
00:44:53.680playing on these very, you know, longstanding stories and themes of Odysseus as the intrepid
00:45:00.040and insatiable explorer. And it's worth underscoring, I want to just come back and
00:45:04.080reconnect this to America, specifically the celebration of our 250th birthday with the
00:45:08.840Declaration of Independence. Because when Dante portrays Odysseus or Ulysses as this figure who
00:45:16.500pushes the boundaries and goes to the very ends of the earth to the point of the sort of Christian
00:45:21.740in heaven and attempts to ascend it against the rules and laws of God, that this image of Odysseus
00:45:29.500as potentially the figure who pushes boundaries or pushes past boundaries that are allowable to
00:45:35.440human beings, in the Dantean world, this is seen as a kind of sinful exercise, that he's an
00:45:42.020exemplar of a kind of hubris. And this is why he's in this very low circle of hell. At least one of1.00
00:45:46.680the reasons is that he is someone who seeks a kind of forbidden knowledge, like going all the way
00:45:51.160back to the fall of human beings in the Garden of Eden, forbidden knowledge of the tree of the
00:45:56.180knowledge of good and evil. But in the Renaissance, this version of Odysseus now has changed. And now
00:46:02.220it starts to anticipate the Tennyson understanding, which is that this figure who seeks all the
00:46:09.480possibilities of the unknown and pushes the boundaries of the permissible, this is now an
00:46:14.060admirable figure. And so at the very time that this change is happening in how the kind of
00:46:20.500Christian world of the time thinks about Odysseus, this change from that more medieval
00:46:26.400understanding of a figure of transgression to a figure to be celebrated in the Renaissance
00:46:31.540gets morphed with the journeys of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, the figures,
00:46:38.820the European figures who make the claim to having found the new world. And they are described in
00:46:44.540kind of the modern press of the time and the kind of poets and the stories that are being told,
00:46:49.320they're described metaphorically as the new Odysseus. And in the book, I really make a point
00:46:53.960of saying that by this telling, in a sense, Odysseus discovers America, at least in the
00:46:59.800European mind. And I think that lays down a certain kind of, you could say, imaginary
00:47:05.800self-understanding that from the very beginning, this country was in a sense settled by Odysseus
00:47:13.120like figures. It was discovered by those people pushing the boundaries. And why is I think it's
00:47:18.300fair to say, as we think about the 250th celebration of America, that Odysseus was here all
00:47:25.460along. You end the book making this interesting argument. You know, Americans, we are an explorer
00:47:31.440of people. We're ambitious. We're restless. But you argue for us to have that drive, that ambition,
00:47:37.880that sense of risk-taking, you need a home. And it seems like there's less of a sense of home for a
00:47:45.400lot of Americans. We're feeling lonely. We're atomized. How does having a home allow someone
00:47:51.540to take risks and go on adventures and be ambitious? Yeah. The last chapter of the book is,
00:47:58.540I actually, I use the image of Scylla and Charybdis.
00:48:01.980So again, people, whether you know the book or you saw the film, you'll know this is the
00:48:05.980two really great dangers that Odysseus has to navigate between.
00:48:12.080And he doesn't have a choice in a sense, but to go between these two great perils.
00:48:17.240The one choice he has is where kind of to sail between these two great perils.
00:48:22.580And those, again, who know the book or have seen the film know, Odysseus is told, he's advised, both by Circe and by Tiresias, that he should navigate toward the less dangerous of these two perils.
00:48:36.280In this case, Scylla, which is a creature with six heads that will grab six men off of the ship and devour them.
00:48:43.980And so this is quite a horrible fate for those six men. But the alternative is to sail either closer to the Charybdis or even down the middle. The presumption being that if you went down the middle, maybe you could escape both.
00:48:57.960But it turns out Charybdis is a whirlpool with such a strong current that if you try to avoid all of the dangers by going down the middle, you'll be sucked into the greater of the two dangers.
00:49:08.620That it's kind of more powerful and the greater danger will suck you in even if you try to go down the middle.
00:49:17.060And at the conclusion of the book, I suggest that we are kind of in a situation of the Scylla and Charybdis and we always are.0.94
00:49:22.740We have to always recognize, in a sense, where we are in terms of navigating our world at this given time. And if these two poles of our Odyssean existence are always part of who we are, there can be times when we maybe exhibit more of one than the other, and that this can be a kind of danger that we may need to have to avoid.0.77
00:49:46.120we may have to tack a little bit closer to the other direction, which also isn't without its
00:49:52.160own perils. So you can imagine, of course, a society that's too homebound and too comfortable
00:49:58.740and too complacent and too much just bound up in the familiar. And such a society would lack
00:50:06.000dynamism and would lack adventurousness and would not be as dynamic as America rightly is.
00:50:11.620I think we rightly recognize as a kind of positive quality of what it is to be an American.
00:50:17.360But we also can recognize that too much of that quality can lead to a kind of detachment,
00:50:23.960can lead to a lack of commitment, can result in the kind of fraying of our social lives for the
00:50:31.100sake of our own individual pursuits. And in our political and social and even just personal lives,
00:50:37.580this can really have just terrible negative effects on us as both individuals and of course
00:50:42.860as a society. And I conclude the book by suggesting that if we evaluate where the sort of
00:50:48.560Scylla and Charybdis is today in terms of sort of home seeking and exploring, that we are perhaps
00:50:55.920more homeless than we should be as a society. And I mean that not necessarily literally,
00:51:02.760although I think for many younger people who are having a difficult time buying a home,
00:51:06.860affording a home, making families, committing to somebody, getting married, having the courage to
00:51:13.180have children and having the confidence to have children and make a family, that we as a society
00:51:19.980have really moved toward a real peril that we have to correct for. And, you know, that might be some
00:51:26.800public policy. It might be podcasts like this one. It might be, you know, professors like me and
00:51:32.200hopefully teachers in universities that might be able to sort of move this ship in a kind of
00:51:37.900correct our current course. And I conclude by suggesting that, you know, it may be that there's
00:51:43.540a kind of a formative and important connection between these two phenomenon that in the same way
00:51:49.280that Odysseus himself is formed by his love of home and carries with him this love of home,
00:51:56.280it makes possible in some senses the confidence to push the boundaries in the ways that he does
00:52:02.700and to allow oneself to be tempted by that which we as human beings can be tempted by with the
00:52:09.820confidence that one can resist those temptations knowing who you are and having the confidence
00:52:14.860that I know you know in this case I'm Odysseus I'm the husband of Penelope I'm the father of
00:52:21.400Telemachus, I'm from the island of Ithaca. In some senses then that the capacity to be
00:52:27.540the adventurous seeker that we would hope that many Americans will still remain
00:52:33.580maybe is connected to our ability also to be home, at home, to come from homes and to know
00:52:41.760that there are homes to which we can return. And the belief then that we can somehow retain
00:52:47.600and remain a dynamic, adventurous, bold society without at the same time attending to and even
00:52:54.420strengthening our capacity to be home bound and home oriented creatures. Maybe that confidence
00:53:01.700isn't actually supported by the evidence of our own historical experience in our tradition,
00:53:08.160that we have to hold those two poles of ourselves kind of in constant tension. And if we're
00:53:14.140dangerously moving toward one, it really may not ultimately be good for our national character.
00:53:20.500Well, Patrick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:53:23.500and your work? Well, the book is available online. My publisher is a wonderful new publisher called
00:53:29.180Creed and Culture. You can go to their website. They've got a short list to this point, but really
00:53:33.740wonderful books. And I think you can buy it at a discount on their site as well. So I appreciate
00:53:38.840the interest and having had this conversation with you. Well, Patrick Deneen, thanks for time.