As an English professor who has taught the Odyssey every semester for the last 35 years, along with a dozen or so film classes on Hitchcock, Capra, musicals, Hollywood studios, and film classics, I awaited the release of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey with great anticipation. Overall, I was impressed by the film and by Nolan’s fresh [...]
The planting of trees in the orchard—the passing down of tradition, of the moral wisdom of the past, of the torch of life, and of the beauty of life’s simplest but richest and pleasures—produces the great harvest of joy that culminates in the final chapters of the "Odyssey." Editor’s Note: This is the final essay [...]
The problem with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is, ironically, that it is too Christian. Despite the hubbub from some online conservatives screaming about how “woke” it is (usually before seeing it), the real deficiency of the movie is that it whitewashes the barbarity of the ancient world. It makes Odysseus seem like a Christian, at least [...]
The warm joys of "The Odyssey" are not necessarily the “feel-good” kind. They’re sharp and unexpected, like splinters of hope. This is not just a tale of a lone hero who overcomes adversity and completes a journey, not just about survival and homecoming. It’s also about the pearls to be harvested from suffering. You remember [...]
An odyssey is an adventurous and searching journey, or an intellectual or spiritual quest. It is the proper name for the life of learning. One can shape one’s own odyssey into a journey that lacks neither enchantment nor definition. My title is a question: “Do you know what an odyssey is?” I am asking each of [...]
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.” So begins Homer’s Odyssey. Long ago I launched my ship in pursuit of the true, the good, and [...]
From the Greek dramatists to Joyce and Kazantzakis, the character of Odysseus has continued to fascinate. Robert Fagles has done such a superb job in his translation of “The Odyssey” that perhaps not since Homer has this epic hero seemed both so grand and so human. The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles; introduction [...]
As enticing as Odysseus’ adventures are, questions remain: what of Penelope, Telemachus, Laertes, and indeed Ithaca left behind? What about their twenty years without a King, a father, a husband, and a son? Odysseus’ brief encounter with his faithful dog Argos demonstrates the price paid by those left behind. When Odysseus, the man of wily [...]
We can encourage openness of expectation in ourselves and in one another, so that the mysterious gifts of experience, strange exhilarations and wonders, gifts from we know not where, will not be lost on us. A just expectation of life may include an expectation of moments that seem mysterious gifts from we know not where. [...]
Here is my effort to construct a solid program of reading for a classical high school curriculum. Last month I wrote an essay for The Imaginative Conservative on “Classical Education and American Literature” in which I explained the rationale for the selection of titles by American authors for a high school literature curriculum. One of [...]
I am to write about my hero Odysseus and to connect him to Liberal Arts. A tall order, you might think, considering that this clever young king of Ithaca and wily old warrior at Troy probably — no, certainly — never read a book in his life, and that to me, at least, the liberal [...]
How do I know that there were dead white males who loved and respected their wives? Because the twin literary fountainheads of Western literature each highlights a mature and faithful couple who share mutual affection and regard for one another: Hector and Andromache in the "Iliad"; Odysseus and Penelope in the "Odyssey." As a Texan [...]
Much like the weary Greek scouts who succumbed to the effects of the alluring lotus fruit in the “Odyssey,” we have lost sight of the higher ends for which we are designed. The Western world no longer possesses a firm sense of purpose or understanding of itself. But what has led to such a general [...]
A culture that fails to represent, or that misrepresents its wars in all their glory, gravity, and tragedy, is a weaker polity. Epic poetry, with its stark recording of the facts and feelings of war, can give cultures and communities access to the reality of warfare and inscribe its memory on the collective consciousness and [...]