Keeping Up With The Greeks

When Christopher Nolan decided to film The Odyssey, he had no shortage of distinguished English translations from which to choose. From among them, he chose Emily Wilson’s, remarkable for its freshness, clarity, and contemporary English while remaining faithful to Homer’s poetry.

Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated The Iliad. Unlike some modern “translators,” whose work consists largely of revising earlier English versions, Wilson translates directly from the ancient Greek text. She is equally at home in Latin, a reminder of the extraordinary linguistic preparation classical scholarship once demanded.

That accomplishment is no small feat. Were Homeric Greek taught as a modern foreign language, its highly inflected grammar would make it among the most demanding languages to master, up there with Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.

Wilson also reads classical Greek fluently, the evolved language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Aristotle with its unique vocabulary and grammar.

My own acquaintance with the classical languages began in high school, where I studied Latin for two years. The curriculum offered four years, but I opted instead for French and German. Today, my old high school no longer teaches those languages, having replaced them with Spanish.

A few years later, I enrolled in an intensive eight-week Harvard summer course in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire and language of the New Testament. Easier than Homeric or classical Greek, it nevertheless presents formidable challenges.

Our Australian instructor insisted that we learn Greek actively rather than merely decipher it. Instead of translating Greek into English, we were expected to orally translate English into Greek. With only ten students in the room, we couldn’t evade being called upon repeatedly to think, speak, and stumble in the language in real-time. That meant knowing where the accents fell for each word, often very arbitrary, unlike Spanish and Italian.

It was a demanding approach, but by the end of the course I could work through New Testament passages with little more than the aid of a dictionary. Most of that Greek has long since vanished, although I can still read the alphabet, which proved unexpectedly useful years later when I studied Russian, whose Cyrillic alphabet derives in part from Greek.

Impressed with my teacher, I asked him how long he had studied the classical languages. His answer has remained with me ever since: “Thirteen years of Latin; eleven years of Greek.” I was in good hands.

I’ve often regretted not keeping up with Greek, a language renowned for precision in contrast to English, whose richness often lies in words layered with multiple shades of meaning, wonderful for poetry, but often less exact. Reading Greek reveals layers of irony, structural symmetry, and philosophical nuance that disappear in translation.

Growing up in Massachusetts, one could spend a Saturday “junking” through secondhand bookstores and antique shops, coming away with Latin and Greek grammars for a dime apiece, evidence of the former preeminence of classical languages in the curriculum of schools such as Boston Latin School.

Long before my own time, that same New England landscape was shaped by minds saturated in the classics. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Plato in the original Greek, finding in those ancient dialogues the architecture for his own transcendental philosophy. His friend Henry David Thoreau famously carried his Greek text of The Iliad with him to Walden Pond, writing in Walden that true literature must be read in the language in which it was written—the ancient letters “carved out of the breath of life itself.”

Much of that world has faded. Outside a handful of elite institutions like Deerfield Academy, Groton, Phillips Exeter, or in schools like England’s Eton, the sustained study of Latin and Greek has become increasingly rare. Wilson herself began studying both languages at Oxford High School, an independent all-girls school in Oxford before reading Classics (“Greats”) at Balliol College, Oxford, and earning her doctorate at Yale.

I sometimes imagine what it would have been like had I continued with Greek throughout my life: to read Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Homer in their own words, perhaps allowing my synapses to mount a quiet resistance to incipient forgetfulness.

I think, too, of modern writers like J.K. Rowling and Toni Morrison, whose formal classical training echoes structurally throughout their work. And yet, the figure who haunts me most is one who had to build her own door to the ancient world: Virginia Woolf.

Denied the university education her brothers received, simply because she was a woman, she taught herself Greek and continued reading it throughout her life. For Woolf, Greek was not an academic ornament, but a living intellectual companion shaping her prose, her essays, and her understanding of literature.

Each year I return to her magnificent essay, “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), invariably lingering on her summarizing sentence:

“It is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, the confusion, the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”

—rj

A Dickinson Poem

I recently came upon this Emily Dickinson poem—one I hadn’t read before, yet find incredibly rich in resonance, crafted with immense subtlety. Understood most fully within its New England cultural context, it brilliantly nuances contemporary reflection as well in its strident humanism.

She remains my favorite poet:

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we dont believe
Does not exhilirate.

That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate –
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.

Briefly, the poem opens with the speaker’s affirmation that life is to be cherished precisely because of its transience. She refuses to feign belief in something she cannot embrace: the recompense of an afterlife.

The second stanza explains why, drawing on “ablative”—the Latin grammatical case denoting removal or “taking away.” To Dickinson, a conventional heaven is an “ablative estate” because it strips away our physical, sensory selves. (Intriguingly, “ablation” also carries a modern surgical definition of tissue removal, reinforcing this sense of loss).

Ultimately, the proffer of this sterile, diminished eternity only instigates an appetite “precisely opposite”: a heightened hunger for the sensory, mortal now.

–RJ

Why Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey Is A Must See

I haven’t been to a movie theater in five years. With inflation, it’s become an extravagance, unnecessary when you can simply wait a few months and rent the film for home viewing.

Having said that, and still believing it, I fully intend to break the habit for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, opening in theaters July 17.

Perhaps I’ve fallen prey to the hype, but I have an almost irresistible urge to see this one on the big screen. I taught Homer’s epic for thirty years, and every time I returned to it I discovered something I had somehow missed before.

If pressed, I would call The Odyssey the greatest saga ever told. Born of an oral tradition nearly three thousand years ago, it remains astonishingly contemporary, its influence reaching through Western literature: Virgil’s The Aeneid, James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and countless other works that consciously echo Homer’s enduring voyage.

Joyce called it the most universal of stories, and I think he was right.

Within its pages are some of literature’s most enduring archetypes, recalling Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth: the hero’s journey of separation, ordeal, and return; the enchantress and the temptress; the faithful spouse; judgment, homecoming, and restoration.

Then there are the symbols: the sea, the descent into the underworld, Penelope’s shroud, the bow that proves identity, the purifying fire.

Three great themes, however, lend the poem its lasting power.

First, assertion versus passivity. Thoroughly existential long before existentialism, The Odyssey insists that we become ourselves through engagement rather than retreat, through action rather than surrender. The Lotus-Eaters, Calypso, and the luxurious ease of Phaeacia all tempt Odysseus to abandon his purpose.

Second, boundaries. Again and again Homer reminds us that there are limits human beings ignore at their peril: reverence for the sacred, loyalty to family, fidelity to one’s companions, respect for hospitality. Even Scylla and Charybdis embody the necessity of steering between destructive extremes.

Finally, there is cosmic evil. Whether arising from nature’s indifference or human cruelty, evil is real, unmoved by moral persuasion, and must be recognized before it can be confronted. Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops remains one of literature’s unforgettable dramatizations of that truth.

Some critics have faulted Nolan’s film for historical inaccuracy. Matt Damon, they say, doesn’t look Greek. The armor is not archaeologically faithful. Telemachus reportedly calls his father “Daddy.” Most controversially, Nolan casts the Oscar-winning Lupita Nyong’o in a double role as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra.

None of those objections strikes me as especially important.

Few moviegoers will care whether the armor is perfectly Mycenaean. As for the contemporary dialogue, Nolan appears to have drawn heavily from Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation, whose accessible modern English has introduced Homer to an entirely new generation of readers.

That seems to me a virtue, and not a flaw. The Odyssey deserves as wide an audience as possible, especially among younger readers, upon whom its future ultimately depends.

As for Nyong’o’s casting, Elon Musk condemns it as “groveling” to “woke” expectations. The resultant backlash, unfortunately evident in some 600,000 dislikes of YouTube’s final trailer, says far more about our present moment than it does about Homer.

I find Nyong’o a magnetic presence, and admire Nolan’s willingness to ignore predictable objections. We inhabit a global culture now. Homer belongs to all of us.

Advance sales suggest that plenty of people agree. The film’s 70mm IMAX screenings have been selling out months in advance.

My wife and I already know where we’ll be.
In our seats. And with buttered popcorn, too.

–RJ

Needed: The Courage to Tell the Truth

Marlin Stuzman, R-IN

Despite assurances from several Republicans that they’ve spoken at length with Senator Mitch McConnell, hospitalized five weeks ago, we have yet to hear a single public word from the eighty-four-year-old Kentuckian himself. Governor Andy Beshear did the proper thing this week by sending the senator a letter requesting a candid accounting of his health.

Kentuckians, and indeed the nation, are entitled to such transparency from those they elect to high office. This is not a partisan demand but a democratic one.

I find myself in rare agreement with Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, whose unusually candid remarks distinguish him from the practiced evasions of so much contemporary politics:

“You know, just the things that I’ve heard and seen from some friends is that he’s obviously not doing well, but don’t know if he’s alive or has passed away. His constituents deserve answers where he is at,” Stutzman said.

“I think that the governor of Kentucky has every right to ask after three weeks that no one has said anything. As a Republican, I think we need to hold our own party accountable. And so, the fact that we haven’t heard anything really from Senator McConnell is very discouraging and concerning,” Stuzman added.

Politics, by its partisan nature, so often assumes the countenance of Machiavelli, cloaking its embarrassments in the respectable garments of euphemism and doublespeak until concealment itself becomes a civic virtue.

Stutzman’s plainspoken willingness to question his own party is refreshing not because it is extraordinary in principle, but because it has become extraordinary in practice.

Democrats are hardly immune to the same temptation. For months they brushed aside mounting evidence that Maine’s Graham Platner was unfit for public office, choosing loyalty over candor until the testimony of a liberal woman made further denial impossible. One is left to wonder how differently events might have unfolded had the whistleblower been a conservative.

Such questions are uncomfortable precisely because they expose a habit shared by both parties: the instinct to protect power first and truth afterward.

—RJ

Habits, History, and Rebirth Through Reading

Thus far, my plan to read 50–60 books a year, based on a new approach to how and what I read, has become one of the most fufilling disciplines of my life. I’ve just completed Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, an award-winning biography based on newly discovered manuscripts that shatter long-held fallacies regarding Gauguin. It’s my twenty-third book this year, with six months still to go.

It’s not numbers per se that interest me, but the cultivation of reading as a daily habit, as natural as brushing one’s teeth. I was inspired by James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which demonstrates how small, repeated behaviors, faithfully practiced, become almost automatic.

I’m reminded of B.F. Skinner. I was immersed in behaviorism in an intensive graduate seminar at the University of Minnesota, where I wrote a paper on teaching oneself a new language. Years later, I learned Spanish by applying those very principles.

My new read is Hugh Raffles’ The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, a scholarly masterpiece, riveting in its exploration of “unconformity”—the violent rupture where geological strata meet across immense reaches of time: earth’s history, from life’s primitive transition from water to land some 400 million years ago, prodigious in unconformity, cyclic cooling and warming, and sudden, often violent morphings into alien landscapes redolent of ever more evolved flora and fauna; reverberations of random catastrophe, the dominion of the temporal yielding at last the first vertebrates.

So too the human record bears its own unconformities: the clash of values, old and new, secular and religious, progressive and conservative; the collisions of mores, civilizations, and cultures.

I am fascinated, learning so many new things. That is why I relish reading, for with each challenging book I am reborn.

Resplendent Brilliance: A Birthday Tribute to Peter Singer

Today is renowned ethicist Peter Singer’s birthday, and I wish him everything well, both now and in the future. No one has shaped my values more than Peter, consistently monitoring the ethical dilemmas of contemporary life with courage, sensitivity, candor, and clarity—attributes resplendent in the intellectual brilliance of some fifty books treating animal suffering, poverty, mortality, the environment, affluence, and the plight of developing nations.

As a dedicated environmentalist, I wouldn’t be a vegetarian were it not for Singer: “We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet—for the sake of hamburgers” (Animal Liberation).

Across the years, I’ve made transparent my profound admiration for utilitarian John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty is a must-read. In Singer, we have his worthy successor, reinvigorating the intrinsic value of philosophy rooted in the factual and empirical, while putting to the test the prejudicial assumptions that deter our collective happiness.

In a time of ubiquitous existential despair, he reminds us that humans possess a latent altruism that can respond and make for a better world; one more equitable, lived with empathy and tolerance.

And Singer walks the talk. Upon graduating university, he began donating 10% of his income to charity. Today, that’s mushroomed to an astonishing 33% of his income, directed entirely to high-impact charities. On winning the coveted Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in 2021, he gave its $1 million award entirely to charity.

Singer has restored philosophy as an axiom of the purposeful life, writing that “philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

The happiest of birthdays to you, Peter, and many more!

–RJ

The America I Remember

Mort Kūnstler, Washington Crossing the Delaware

I didn’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday yesterday. How could I, with Trump still at the helm of a listing ship? Our country is so deeply fractured that I lack confidence our ship of state can ever be restored to an even keel again.

While the mid-terms loom, a new, more radical faction seems to be taking hold, offering simple remedies, under the aegis of expanded government, to complex problems that may well prove incendiary to America’s best interests.

History is being distorted—accompanied by the rise of a heated rhetoric, the past filtered through a modern lens, as if we can sanitize our heritage by consigning to oblivion our flawed heroes who nonetheless made America possible.

To contend, as some now do, that the Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery is a profound untruth. In 1776, Great Britain had no intention of dismantling the institution. While Royal Governor Lord Dunmore famously offered freedom to slaves who fled rebel masters to fight for the Crown, his proclamation was a cynical tactic of war, not a moral crusade; Dunmore himself owned a hundred slaves whom he exempted from his proclamation, and Britain did not outlaw slavery in its empire until 1833. The colonists revolted over representation and imperial overreach, not a defense of bondage.

Far from protecting slavery, the radical ideals unleashed by the Revolution ignited the Western world’s very first widespread abolitionist movement, a moral arc that would ultimately culminate in a bloody Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

History taught from the periphery, filtered through rigid ideology or simplified into monolithic narratives, is intrinsically dangerous. It rests on a priori assumptions and is too often promulgated with dogmatism. True understanding requires nuance, humility, and courage.

Intolerance and intimidation increasingly menace our daily life. It’s a different America from the one I grew up with—dynamic, prosperous, a nation deserving of its patriotism.

And why not?

At the end of WWII, a victorious America was the sole nuclear power. It possessed an army of 14 million, an air force of 50,000 planes, and the largest naval force in history with nearly 7,000 ships, including 99 aircraft carriers.

Yet, alone among the global empires of history, America walked away from total dominion and chose peace over subjugation.

This is the America I remember and want back again.

—RJ

Saving What Remains

Every now and then, I find myself captivated by a book I stumbled upon by pure serendipity. So much of life is like that, isn’t it?—a lifelong friend suddenly made, an unexpected alpine view, a chance conversation on a plane.

I am currently reading Pam Houston’s Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country (2019), a memoir of healing from a traumatic childhood on a remote ranch in the Colorado mountains.

Her writing is electric, sumptuous with vivid metaphor, jolting the reader into an awareness of nature’s turning wheel and inherent vulnerability. She explores the solace of animals, the loyalty of friends who show up in times of need, the sharp contrasts between urban and rural life—all of it intuitive, and all of it beautiful

It is so superbly written that, should I ever need an exit from insomnia, I would choose its audio version to placate the night, inducing deep slumber as swiftly as anesthesia on a patient lying on a surgeon’s table.

What moves me even more than her narrative of healing from life’s traumas on a remote Colorado ranch is Houston’s passionate love for our wounded earth, currently suffering the consequences of human disregard in the pursuit of profit and self-indulgence.

I am imbibing this book not just cerebrally, but emotionally, as it adumbrates my own passion for saving what remains. I cannot fathom a world bequeathed to our children and grandchildren that is absent of seals, humpback whales, polar bears, and salmon-filled streams—a world where the last untouched forests have given way to roads, lumberjacks, and pipelines.

Houston’s book carries a profound urgency, reminding us how little time remains to get our priorities right:

“Something is definitely wrong….The closer one got to the North and South poles, the more dramatic and obvious the effects of climate change. I didn’t want to live in a world without polar bears. I wasn’t sure an ocean without whales in it was any kind of ocean at all. My entire life I had watched, heartbroken, as individual pieces of wilderness that mattered to me got destroyed or developed, but I had believed, for reasons I am not clear on now (propaganda? denial? naïveté?), that the earth contained vast tracts of land humans had not pushed into. Now, I understood this thing we called technology had advanced to a point where no place on the planet was safe from our penchant for destruction. I found myself glad we had never colonized the moon.”

Houston writes here of her 2015 journey as a journalist encountering British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. No roads. No lumberjacks. No liquefied natural gas pipelines.

Five months later, an agreement protecting the rainforest’s fate was reached between the provincial government, the First Nations, and the logging industry, shielding 85 percent of the forest from felling.

Yet, only a few months after that, an inattentive tugboat driver fell asleep at the helm, running his ship and its towed barge aground, releasing more than 110,000 gallons of diesel fuel into the pristine waters of the Great Bear’s Seaforth Channel.

I relish this book for its affirmation of nature’s grandeur, mystery, and moods, and for its acknowledgement that our fellow animals are possessed of unique personalities, emotions, and an astonishing intelligence. Elephants mourn their dead. Chimpanzees recognize themselves in mirrors. And yes, they can suffer—and often do, largely at human hands.

In Houston, I have found a co-conspirator on their behalf, whether the creature is a dog, a horse, a lamb, or even a chicken:

“I had been born knowing that if you held the proper measuring stick, animals would always test smarter than people, and nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime has disabused me of that notion. We may have more complicated language, opposable thumbs and this dangerous thing called reason, but any self-respecting llama or buffalo or spider knows enough not to destroy its own home.”

Houston’s book offers both joy and sorrow, and it is well worth your time. Great books endure long after their final page is turned.

–RJ

Voter Awareness: Avoiding Authoritarian Temptations

Photo by Greg Jewett

As America increasingly turns its attention to politics with the midterms looming, there exist inherent dangers to guard ourselves against, the most prominent among them the ideologue who offers simple answers to complex problems, caters to popular sentiment, promises much, ignoring the consequences.

The foremost tragedies of twentieth-century history were wrought by the rise of autocrats—Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—advocates of total government who were intolerant of dissension and bound by the collective dictum that the end justifies the means.

As the late Sir Isaiah Berlin cautioned, “All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.”

Voters today must be discriminating, wary of the “brave new worlders” who would trade the painful, magnificent burden of personal choice for the comfortable chains of an enforced, singular truth.

—RJ

THE ART OF THE RUSHED DEAL

It had seemed, for a fleeting moment, that congressional Republicans were emerging at last from their long cocoon, appearing ready to join Democrats in calling out President Trump’s profound blunder—not only in launching a 110-day war (Operation Epic Fury) heedless of its catastrophic risks, but in his subsequent appeasement of a rogue, murderous regime.

Initial Republican scrutiny was fierce, public, and remarkably direct. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana openly declared the deal “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” thirteen American service members dead, families crushed at the pump, only for sanctions to be lifted and the bombing to stop.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was even more unsparing, capturing the core absurdity of the framework by warning that “history teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea.” For a few days, it looked as though a genuine, unified groundswell of Republican consensus had taken shape.

What sparked this rare mutiny were emerging details of the newly brokered Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), reading less like calculated diplomacy and more like a wholesale capitulation by a president eager to flee a senseless conflict.

The concessions granted to Tehran are immediate and staggering. Through instant Treasury waivers, the administration has bypassed existing sanctions, leaving Iranian freighters entirely free to ship crude oil to China, their best customer.

A fragile 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz has begun, yet the fundamental balance of power has been upended.

While negotiators commence talks on the vital issue of nuclear acquisition, the regime’s potent, increasingly long-range ballistic missile and drone capabilities receive no mention in the text. Neither do its beleaguered citizens—thousands of whom were killed by rooftop snipers last January, with many more imprisoned, including a Nobel Peace Prize winner, as state executions continue unabated.

Furthermore, the agreement features a deeply controversial provision to open the gates for a $300 billion reconstruction and development mechanism, effectively enriching the coffers of a regime that was bordering on total economic collapse.

Trump loudly protests that the windfall is conditional on Tehran’s behavior, promising that if they prove stubborn about their uranium stockpile, the U.S. will simply recommence its bombing. It is a hollow gamble, built on the unconscionable premise of offering a massive financial lifeline to a theocratic dictatorship.

Democrats recognize the MOU for exactly what it is: a desperate attempt by a frightened president, booed at public appearances, to walk away from a historic blunder.

They point out that trading away massive economic leverage upfront just to buy a 60-day dialogue leaves the United States in a vastly inferior strategic position than it occupied before the conflict began, back when Iran’s uranium enrichment was still capped.

For a brief window, initial Republican scrutiny gave teeth to a potential congressional resistance. Lawmakers began drafting legislation to strip the Executive Branch’s ability to issue these oil waivers, a move that would collapse the $300 billion mechanism.

Yet the glaring obstacle remains—the presidential veto. To truly stop the administration, Congress would require a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers—a hill that has suddenly become far too steep to climb.

The resistance effectively crumbled when Senator Lindsey Graham, who had previous dubbed the fund “a Marshall Plan with the Nazis still in charge,” executed his sharp turnabout. Initially vehemently opposed, the leading hawk offered a tepid endorsement of the agreement after a single closed-door briefing. Vice President JD Vance instantly weaponized Graham’s reversal, using it during a blunt White House press conference to excoriate a deeply disillusioned Israel, warning their cabinet to fall in line or risk losing their last major ally.

Once again, Trump’s immense gravitational pull has had its way, dampening conservative scrutiny and fracturing any hope of a unified legislative front.

The emperor wears no clothes, yet Capitol Hill has folded. We are left watching a presidency trade away hard-won geopolitical leverage for a temporary reprieve, like a used car salesman successfully selling the country a piece of junk.

—RJ