The Odyssey by Homer: Day 5
Book 4, lines 347-847
Proteus is elusive, changeable, the bearer of truth. What a complicated scene from which to wrest this irresistible metaphor for thought (Wordsworth and Joyce are not the only writers who have been under its sway). This time I notice different details: the smell surrounding Menelaus cloaked in his own animal disguise. The fact that it’s Proteus’s daughter who checks her father’s power and divulges how to best him.
One summer I cotaught The Odyssey at an experimental program for college-age women and nonbinary students, and we all just couldn’t get over how much of the epic Odysseus spends crying. There he is:
“I saw him crying, shedding floods of tears / upon Calypso’s island.”
The physical cascade of Penelope’s reactions to learning of the plot on her son’s life. How believable it is that in her terror, despair, and impotence, when she first speaks, she blames him.
Join us on March 18 for a virtual discussion of The Odyssey with Stefania Heim
Counting seals before going to sleep--it seems a wonderfully sustaining habit. I was reminded by today's reading that Nabokov said somewhere that The Tempest might be considered the first science fiction.
I asked a student, who's working on a thesis she calls speculative fiction, to read Iliad and Odyssey, and she reported a couple of days ago to me that she found them quite tedious. Today's reading rather put a balm on my heart bruised on behalf of Homer.
When Penelope is reassured by a phantom that Telemachus will return unharmed, her next impulse, understandably is to inquire about her husband—“Careful Penelope replied, ‘If you/are actually a god, with news from gods,/tell me about my husband too, poor man!/Tell me if he is alive and sees the sun,/or dead already in the house of Hades!’”
The answer astonished me: “The spirit said, ‘I cannot tell you whether/he is alive or dead. It is not good/to speak of things intangible as wind.’” In a world where so many things are ordained and some spirits can see and even control future outcomes, Odysseus is consigned to a fate akin to Schrodinger’s cat!
Elsewhere, seemingly relatively powerful mortals are held captive by an obligation to be gracious. For example, see Phronius’ explanation for loaning his ship to Telemachus: “. . . I gave it freely/What could I do, when someone so upset/was asking me? A noble boy like that?/It would have been ungracious to refuse.”
And there was this immensely understated cautionary observation that will serve well any and all concerned in this enterprise: “It is not easy for men to catch/a god . . .”