A Teacher's Odyssey

 

I was pleasantly surprised when some of my former Latin students posted online that they were awaiting my review of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.  My family and I had already planned to see it with one of my own former teachers, and so as the film unfolded, I began to consider what I would say for the sake of my students and friends.

A Child Running Around for Ice Cream

When we met my former teacher and one of her friends, I displayed a bit of enthusiasm as we walked to the auditorium where the film would be playing.  In her words, I was like a child running around for ice cream.

I'm not sure why she said that.  It wasn't as if I was such a fan boy that I wore the Indiana University Classical Studies t-shirt of my alma mater just for the occasion or had one of my adult children take a picture of me with the movie posters.  She was right, of course.  For a guy who has spent more than forty years in the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, this was a movie I could not miss.

Teacher and student at the movies

It's Not PBS

This film is not a documentary on ancient warfare, Classical poetry, or ancient mythology.  It is retelling of a classic work of fiction that has some historical roots.  It serves no purpose to point out that the film does not use armor or props accurate to what we know of Bronze Age-Greece.  It is a retelling.  It is a translation, just as was Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus in 1960 and Zach Snyder's 2006 film 300, and every translation of anything, whether from one language into or another or from medium into another, will add things, omit things, and change things.  An exact, word-for-word version of Homer's Odyssey would simply be the 12,109 lines of dactylic hexameter Greek that constitute the original poem.

For this reason, the stylized armor did not bother me.  I enjoyed it as much as I did that in 300, to which the Trojan helmets bore more than a striking resemblance.

The sets and costumes gave us powerful and exciting visuals and worked well with the many action scenes of warfare and bloodshed.  In fact, they helped give it an otherworldly feel that was important to this retelling.

Is Frank Herbert the Descendant of Homer?

There is an unmistakable feeling of the Denis Villeneuve Dune movies at many points throughout Nolan's The Odyssey, and this makes sense.  The world of Dune is set in the year 10191 on the far off planet of Arrakis, and the world of The Odyssey is just as distant.  Bronze Age-Greece is five thousand years, give or take, removed from our time.  Its culture, values, traditions, rites, and methods of war are utterly alien to ours, and Nolan captures this, not only through the otherworldly feel of the sets and costumes, but also through the music.  In many places we hear metallic sounds in the background that lend an almost sci-fi effect and that sweep us into something entirely beyond ourselves.  And this is why certain language choices are discordant.

While "otherworldly" may be the term to describe much of the feel of this film, it is clearly set in the ancient Mediterranean region.  As a result, words like "mom," "dad," "party" used as a verb, and three instances of the f-word (once as a participle and twice in quick succession as an imperative) seem to stick out like a sore thumb.  Had this version of Homer's epic been set in a different time and place, much as it was in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, such contemporary colloquialisms may have worked, but here they are simply jarring.  Fortunately, such intrusions of our world into this one are few.

And the Oscar Goes To...

There are plenty of A-list names garnering attention in this cast, and most do a fine job with their characters.  This is not Matt Damon's crowning achievement, but he serves well as Odysseus.  Anne Hathaway is a strong Penelope, but top honors go to the supporting roles of Samantha Morton as Circe, Tom Holland as Telemachus, and John Leguizamo as Eumaeus.  Holland's son of Odysseus is appropriately whiny, not in the grating way of Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker, but as we have come to know him through Homer.  The true standouts, however, are Leguizamo, whose strength, loyalty, and brokenness make him a truly sympathetic character and one you want to watch, and Morton, whose portrayal of Circe as psychotic is genuinely disturbing.

Beyond Homer

There is an entire body of ancient literature beyond Homer's two epic poems Iliad and Odyssey that touches on the Trojan War, and Nolan's film draws on them to good effect.  The story of the Trojan Horse is famously told in Book II of Vergil's Latin epic Aeneid.  Vergil gives us the all-important key to making the whole trick work through the character of Sinon, who lies to the Trojans about the horse's true purpose, thus prompting them to take it into the city.  Sinon has a more significant role in the film than in Vergil's poem, but I will say more on this below.  In Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 film Troy, the Trojans arrive at the conclusion on their own that the horse is a gift to the gods, so the inclusion of Sinon here is helpful in making it more reasonable that they would have taken it into the city.

In the fifth century B.C., Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia, a trilogy of plays dealing with the homecoming of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition to Troy.  He had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia before leaving in order to obtain fair winds for sailing, and that was a bridge too far for his wife Clytemnestra.  She took a lover after his departure and spent the years plotting her revenge.  Upon his return, he is stabbed in the bath, and this leads to Orestes, his son, planning and executing revenge for his father by killing his mother.

Menelaus and Helen

Nolan brings all this into his story, again to good effect.  It is first mentioned by Helen when Telemachus visits Menelaus.  She does not go into detail, but Agamemnon does when he returns from the underworld to talk with Odysseus.  Nolan uses this bit in a powerful away, but once again, I will touch on that below, and in a flashback to Telemachus's visit to the Spartan king, Menelaus tells him that Orestes killed his own mother.

Han Shot First

In Homer's poem only Odysseus can string and shoot his bow, and Penelope uses this as a test for the suitors seeking to marry her, challenging them to string and to shoot it through twelve axes as her husband used to do.  No one can do it, and Nolan was faced with a similarly impossible task.  This is a story that has been known and loved around the world for three thousand years.  Countless high school freshman read selections from it every year in English class.  There was no way this film would satisfy everyone.  As I said at the beginning, this film is a translation.  It leaves things out, it puts things in, and it changes elements.  For some, none of this will matter.  For others, it matters a great deal.  In the retelling of a tale as famous as Homer's Odyssey, there are certain bits we expect.  When George Lucas re-released the original Star Wars, he changed the scene in the cantina to show Greedo shooting first at Han Solo, but everyone who saw the film in 1977 knew it was the other way around.  Just Google that one for a fun diversion.  Here are a few of the omissions and changes and that were the most striking.

When Odysseus and his men enter the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, the creature asks Odysseus his name, and he famously answers "Nobody."  After the men have run the stake into his eye, Polyphemus runs from his cave shouting, "Nobody has blinded me," and the other cyclopes tell him to shut up.  This is missing, and it is a mistake.  Nolan says he was not able to work it in.  But anyone familiar with the story only through that freshman English class would have looked for it, and it is strange not to have it.

The cyclops Polyphemus

Other omissions include Hermes giving moly to Odysseus to protect him from Circe's spell, which likely would go unnoticed by any but those most familiar with the poem.  Many, however, will likely recall that Aeolus gives Odysseus all the winds that would harm him bound in a bag, with only one left on the waters to blow his ships home.  His men untie the bag, and the other winds blow them off course, yet this makes no appearance in the film.  Odysseus does not land in Phaeacia, meet the daughter of King Alcinous, or receive the ship from the king that finally takes him to Ithaca.  Gone is the care he shows for his wife when, after the slaughter of the suitors, he tells Telemachus that the room must be cleansed before Penelope can lay eyes upon it, and missing, too, is the famous part about the bed he had made out of a tree.

We did get the episode with the Laestrygonians, although they went unnamed, Scylla and Charybdis, the theft of the sun god's cattle, the Sirens, the suitors attempting to string Odysseus's bow and shoot through the axes, Odysseus's old nurse recognizing his scar, and, in one of the most touching scenes in all of literature, the death of Argus, the dog who waited twenty years for his master to come home.  The episode with the lotus-eaters was transferred to the scenes with Calypso, and that worked well, and there is a nod to the desecration of the Palladium from the Iliad.

Odysseus vs. Laestrygonians

As for significant changes, there is ongoing discussion in the film of how Odysseus lied to Sinon so he would be more credible in telling the Trojans that the horse was a gift to the gods.  Only those familiar with Vergil's Aeneid will know that Sinon was fully aware of the plot and concocted an elaborate lie to deceive the Trojans.   Some will remember the trip Odysseus makes to Hades, but in the film the dead come to him, and it is here that one of the changes works quite well.  As Agamemnon tells Odysseus of his murder at the hands of his wife, he advises the Ithacan king to disguise himself when he gets home.  In Homer's tale, the disguise of a beggar for Odysseus is wrought by Athena, but this works nicely in the context Nolan has constructed.  The general narration of the poem is split across Odysseus's recounting of his adventures to Calypso and Telemachus's discussions with Menelaus, and this is quite effective.

Odyssey Plus

When it comes to additions to the film not found in the poem, three are worth noting.  There is a running focus on the fact that Odysseus did not allow Antinous, who would grow up to become one of the suitors of Penelope, to go with him to Troy.  In this version, Sinon took his place, eventually asking Odysseus to obtain vengeance for him after he has died.  This works dramatically, and although it is not strictly necessary to advance the plot, it does add an interesting element.  What is utterly unnecessary, however, is the sequence in which some of the suitors seek to murder Telemachus as he stops at Pylos on his return home from visiting Menelaus.  In the poem this is his first stop on the way to Menelaus, but it is not the change of order that is bothersome.  There is simply no need for the revised portrayal of the attempt on his life, which in the poem happens upon his return to Ithaca.  It works in the film, but no better than what Homer wrote, which leaves us wondering why the addition.

The other addition is the mindset of Odysseus.  He is known for his hubris, and this is well depicted in his line, "The gods help those who help themselves."  Yet when he is asked what he hears in the Sirens' song, he says it was the realization that he does not really want to go home.  This is a significant addition and change to the motivation of Homer's character, as is his level of self-reflection upon reuniting with his wife Penelope, a scene that necessitates another extended flashback to the Trojan War.  If I may invoke Star Wars once again, a remake of that saga in which Luke Skywalker is driven by thoughts of profit and Han Solo by desire to help the oppressed would cause audiences to howl.

The Final Grade

I am not a great fan of letter grades and will not assign one to this film.  Overall, it is good, and I enjoyed it.  Will I purchase it when it becomes available?  I will, and not only because as a Latin teacher I own most Greco-Roman based films.  Will I show clips to my students to illustrate aspects of the story?  I certainly will and would encourage English teachers to do the same.

The perceptive reader may note a certain underlying condemnation brought about by faint praise, and such a reader may be right.  It is impossible for me to see this film other than through the lens of the poem.  I am sure one unfamiliar with Homer will have an entirely different experience of it.  Still, for all the stunning visuals and sound we have come to expect from a Christopher Nolan work and indeed from most modern films, the script itself pales with those of yesteryear.  This is no Spartacus.  It is not even Gladiator.  In the end, I enjoyed it, but was most pleased with the desire it ignited within me to read the original once again.

The Return of Literature to the Public Square

 

How is it that a new telling of a story dating back sixteen centuries is garnering such attention these days?  Forget asking how it is possible.  How is it even conceivable that a story told as a poem is lighting up the Internet?  It may just be that the author is on to something.

The Story

Malcolm Guite is, according to his Wikipedia entry, a poet, a singer-songwriter, an Anglican priest, and an academic.  The pipe-smoking man of letters has nearly two hundred thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel, which is quite something, since his videos are mostly about the true, the good, and the beautiful, a trinity we seem committed to doing our dead level best to live without these days.  In what will be an epic retelling of the King Arthur story in four volumes, an Arthuriad, Guite has set about to bring the tales of valor into the modern world, and in the first volume, Galahad and the Grail, he launches his epic in a way sure to seize and hold the attention of all readers.

malcolmguite.com

My wife and I both love Vergil's Aeneid, the Latin epic poem of the first century B.C. that tells the tale of Aeneas, the refugee from the Trojan War who labors against gods and men to found a new home in Italy for his fellow Trojans.  Part of what we love about it and a key feature we try each year to help our high school Latin students discover and love with us is the story, and in Vergil it is a rollicking, good one.  Too often the academic study of literature in school settings kills our joy of reading.  No author crafted a story merely as an exercise to demonstrate alliteration or allusion.  While we touch on such things only insofar as they illuminate the story, it is the story itself that matters, and it is in storytelling that Guite excels.

In her foreward, Susanna Clarke writes of this first volume, "It is full of jewel-like colours.  The knights and ladies pass from the emerald-green of woods to the peridot-green of meadows, from grey-walled hermit's cells to the white walls of castles and abbeys, from yellow strand to sparkling blue sea.  The whole poem has the mesmerising brilliance of the little paintings in the margins of illuminated manuscripts -- and that is before we even get to all the banners and heraldry."  A good story is not merely a series of actions, although there are great and powerful actions throughout Guite's poem.  Yet think of the films that have moved you the most.  Quite often it was because, in addition to the actions, the activities of the characters, the scenes were filmed in a particular way.  You don't think about lighting and camera angles and costuming while watching the film, but they work together to create a feeling, and Guite is master of all of it, from portraying the actions of the characters, such as

                                                But Lionel was like one possessed

                                                by hatred and disdain,

                                                and rode his charger at Sir Bors

                                                and smote him down with heavy force

                                                and trampled him beneath his horse --

                                                he fainted with the pain.

Book Two, Stave V, 323-328

to showing us the setting of it all, as in this scene.

                                                At length they saw her place of prayer

                                                built up from mossy stone --

                                                the holy hermit's humble cell

                                                where she had long been wont to dwell

                                                with garden green and deep clear well,

                                                guarded by many a prayer and spell.

                                                Yet in her vigils in that vale

                                                she never prayed alone.

Book Three, Stave I, 226-233

The Poetry

Malcolm Guite is also the musical director of this epic story, for he has chosen to sing it in ballad stanza.  Many of us think of ballad strictly hewing to the form of something like "Sir Patrick Spens," with its stanzas of a four-foot line, followed by a three, then a four, and then a three, and in a rhyme scheme of A-B-C-B.

                                            The king sits in Dumferling toune,

                                            Drinking the blude-reid wine:

                                            "O whar will I get a guid sailor,

                                            To sail this schip of mine?"

What Malcolm Guite has done in his Galahad and the Grail is to expand that and play with it. Consider these three consecutive bits from Book Two, Stave IV.

                                                They saw within the glade a cell

                                                all roughly hewn of stone --

                                                the cell maybe of some recluse

                                                who lived and prayed alone.

These lines, 92-95, follow the Patrick Spens model with the A-B-C-B rhyme scheme.

                                                But ere the two knights could dismount,

                                                they heard a sudden sound

                                                of bridle reins all ringing out

                                                and hoofbeats on the ground.

Lines 96-99 maintain the Patrick Spens meter. The rhyme scheme, however, borders on A-A-A-A, but for the final consonant sound of "t" in lines 96 and 98 and the final consonant sound of "d" in 97 and 99 leading it toward A-B-A-B.

                                                And even as a hermitess

                                                stepped out to greet them there,

                                                a third knight rode into the glade

                                                and cried out, bold and unafraid:

                                                "No man rides past me here!" (lines 100-104)

These last five lines expand the form and call to mind Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius."

                                                By the Nine Gods he swore it,

                                                And named a trysting day,

                                                And bade his messengers ride forth,

                                                East and West and South and North,

                                                To summon his array. (lines 3-6)

The rhythms rise and fall to support and add atmosphere to the story, and with such variations he is able to create genuine music and not a monotonous soundtrack. And as for the rhymes, let us say a bit more about the sonorous versus the monotonous.

In Book Two, Stave VI, lines 174-179, we find this.

                                                And lo! as he sank back in pain

                                                the chapel filled with light.

                                                Lancelot saw a shimmering door

                                                which he had not perceived before,

                                                and as he gazed in fear and awe

                                                it opened on the night.

Alexander Pope was famous for his tightly controlled iambic couplets, which I love, and he rarely admitted any metrical substitutions. Milton, on the other hand, did, and this leant variety to his basically iambic meter much as spondaic substitutions allowed the music to swell and fade in Homer’s and Vergil’s dactylic verse.

The third line of the stanza above opens with a trochee, which Guite not infrequently employs, but the truly interesting part is the anapest of “…mering door,” whose rhythm beautifully captures the movement of the light-filled door.

Yet even more fascinating is his rhyming of “awe” with “door” and “before.” I doubt many would have thought of a rhyme like this, but pay attention to the position of your lips as you say each of those words aloud slowly. You will notice that your mouth forms the same way for each word. They are rhymes, but not as one might expect.

The Faith

In Appendix A, Malcolm Guite tells us how he came to love the legends of Arthur from the telling of his mother when he was a boy.  He writes that the stories that first moved him "were not some sanitised Hollywood version, but the real thing:  haunting, numinous, continuously suggestive of the holy and beautiful reality of God and His saints and angels shimmering through the fabric of the stories of the knights with all their aspirations and all their human flaws.  At the heart of those early versions of the stories is the Holy Grail itself:  the presence of Christ and His gospel, moving as an unbearably beautiful light through the mists and magic of pre-Christian Celtic Britain, drawing even the wizards and faery folk towards Himself, baptising the imagination of our ancestors, fulfilling and disclosing the true meaning of our earliest stories."

As with the rising and falling rhythms of this poem and the variegated landscapes he describes, Malcolm Guite weaves both bold and subtle Christian elements throughout the work.  There are hints toward biblical stories that will only be grasped by those who know the Scriptures, there are references to key moments in the liturgical year and to various aspects of orthodox Christian theology, and there are appearances of Jesus Christ Himself as He actively takes part in this story of kings and knights and maidens.  It is possible that in a world that seems ever more biblically illiterate, such Christian elements may be jarring to some.  The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have not known quite what to do with the divine in their most common form of storytelling, the cinematic film.  There are, of course, depictions of the Norse gods in the Marvel Comics movies, but these are superheroes at best, and there is certainly nothing in those films of the haunting and the numinous that formed the fabric of the Arthurian tales.  Other movies set in the ancient world are largely content to ignore the gods entirely, which is akin to operating a school with blank-faced clocks and books without a table of contents because you have chosen to pretend that numbers do not exist.  Guite is not so pretentious as to pretend such things, but, as one who painstakingly restores masterworks of art, he gives us back a mythical reality filled with Christ and His "unbearably beautiful light."

Awakening Remembrance

How, then, is it possible for a book like this to be garnering so much praise and attention and, by all indications in reviews and fan sites, actual reading of the thing in an age in which evidence and anecdotes suggest that we do not read serious literature and would be incapable of doing so even if we desired to do it?  In Appendix A, Malcolm Guite explains how, when at Cambridge he rediscovered the original sources, he "became aware of how so many modern versions of them seemed to marginalise or even erase the deep Christian impluse that had formed their original telling, and as a poet I longed to restore that lost element in the hope that a new telling might baptise the imagination of the growing generation brought up in a secular world, trapped in 'the immanent frame' and deprived of their inheritance in the gospel."  As I said at the beginning, the author is on to something.  He has sensed that in our dehumanized and dehumanizing world there is still a flicker of light, a trickle of living water beneath the surface of our lives, and rather than wring his hands and decry our sad state, he has simply lit his pipe and set to work in order to present the true, the good, and the beautiful.  In the preface to his 1881 translation of Thucydides, Benjamin Jowett wrote, "[I]f Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions..., like the distant remembrance of youth before the delighted eyes of mankind."  Guite does this with his Galahad and the Grail, and people are eagerly responding because they are finding what they did not realize was missing.

AI Aristotle

 

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of AI
Created by Google Gemini in imitation of Rembrandt

A friend emailed me a blog post from tech CEO Matt Shumer titled "Something Big Is Happening."  If more than 82 million views on X means that something has gone viral, then this post has gone viral.  Based on the recent ability of artificial intelligence to write its own code, in other words, for AI to start producing AI, Shumer argues that a seismic shift in how humans work is coming sooner rather than later, and he is not talking about getting ChatGPT to write your history paper.  He outlines fundamental shifts in the fields of law, medicine, and more.  You really should read his post.  In this post, however, I want to share what I replied to my friend and go a bit further.  To my friend, I wrote,

What I want to say is that we must resist this at all costs, but that is ridiculous.  The horse is already out of the barn.  We have given birth to this, just as we did to writing, electronics, and atomic energy.  We have to learn what do with it.  We must learn from our mistakes with many of our past advancements, among which is not to use faith and philosophy, history and literature and music and art to grapple with ethical issues.  Perhaps the most important acknowledgment by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation was that we sallied forth into smartphones and social media with not a care in the world.  We simply never took the time to consider the effects on children, including their social and emotional development, their patterns of behavior, their intellectual development, and more.  Can we learn from the disaster that is the current intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual landscape of far too many of our young people?  This is a time for philosophers and psychologists and sociologists.  It is a time for theologians.  It is a time for church leaders.  We need deep thinkers now as never before.  We need the age of when the university was a branch of the Church, when theology was called the queen of the sciences.  We need a Plato, an Aristotle, an Augustine, and an Aquinas as never before.  Let this article be inspiration for churches and schools, especially those schools grounded in the liberal arts and Classical learning, to equip those new thinkers that God even now is raising up among us.

I have used AI, even for the creative acts that I so often say are the special province of the human heart and mind.  For example, I have begun using Suno to create the music for song lyrics I have written.  Would I prefer to be in band or at least to run in the circles of musicians who could record my songs?  I most certainly would, but that is not my world at the moment, and I am, perhaps naively, convinced that my songs can touch people and encourage them in their faith.  And so I have resorted to AI for the music.

What I want to start here is a different conversation.  I can envision a course for high school students in which they read selections from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Montaigne, along with works by Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Milton.  It would be a course that would involve Michelangelo and Mozart, and of course, all these names are but a start, an indication of what the foundation for such a course would be.  And the bedrock of that foundation would be the Bible, the printed word God has graciously given the world.  From their reading and engagement with such authors and works, the students would explore how to think about what should and should not be in the worlds of technology, including but not limited to AI, medicine, government, economics, education, and more.  It would be a course first to introduce young minds to the idea that there are various ways to consider what should and should not be and how to develop and use the things that should.  It would help them explore the best, the time-tested and proven, approaches that we have used throughout the centuries.  It would give them a chance to begin applying those approaches as well as their own based upon and drawn from those lines of thinking to contemporary issues.

There is much talk by parents, educators, and legislators about personal devices and the use of AI in schools, but we are at a wonderful moment in history when can go beyond that discussion.  With carefully considered intention and purpose, we can take seriously the admonition to "train up a child in the way he should go" (Proverbs 22:6, KJV) and help produce not employees or those whose aim is a fulfilling and high-paying job, but the great and deep thinkers that we need.  Perhaps the next Aristotle is a student in a school near you.

Minor Keys and Melancholy Mists

 

The Voyage of Life: Childhood, Thomas Cole, 1840

While listening recently to the 1973 Dobie Gray classic "Drift Away," I realized something, or rather, something came back to me that I had not considered in a long time.  I have always been drawn to music in a minor key and to melancholy stories that seem to be wrapped in mist.  Such are the songs and stories that have touched that indefinable place in me and have constituted much of the literature I have memorized over the years.

16th Century Grade School Choir

I first realized how much more deeply a minor key affected me than did a major key when the two were presented to us in music class somewhere around the second or third grade.  When our music teacher played one against the other, I knew instantly which touched me more, and it was sometime around fifth grade that I first encountered the sixteenth century English ballad "Greensleeves."  Clearly, there is nothing about the lyrics to which a boy of eleven could relate, and yet that song took me somewhere that I seemed to know as if through a dream, a place long lost and to which I yearned to return.

It was also during those early years that I discovered "One Tin Soldier" by Coven and "Beth" by KISS.  Although the themes of both are somewhat beyond the reckoning of a child, they both moved me deeply, and from those days until now I am incapable of hearing the Coven piece without weeping.  Clearly, something was afoot.

Non-Pandering Kiddy Lit

There are many books aimed at children that cater and even pander to their immature instincts, often by falling back on bathroom humor.  Two books from my elementary years that not only did not hold up a mirror to my childish self but took me out of that self into remembered places where I had never been, were Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell and My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George.  Nearly fifty years after first reading both of those books, they remain in my mind and in my heart.  A few years ago, I re-read Island of the Blue Dolphins for my own pleasure, and I recall reading My Side of the Mountain to our son when he was a boy.

My mother respected children.  Many, if not most, will say they like children, but my mother genuinely respected their feelings and views of the world.  She affirmed their emotions and never wrote them off as stemming merely from the experience of a child.  She knew what the authors of the best children's literature have known, that young ones, while not always able to articulate their feelings as adults would, nevertheless feel deeply.  Of course, we adults know that some of the deepest feelings arise from the minor keys of life, those moments of longing or loss or the indefinable mists of mystery, and these are the elements that make for truly memorable literature.

The quiet, reflective soul will always, I think, be drawn to the minor keys and melancholy mists of life, whether through music or art or literature, or, for the truly fortunate ones, through all three.  Those of us who work with children do well to have the perspective my mother had, one that respects the deep and ineffable feelings of young people.  When we do, we may just be led to introduce them to those minor keys and melancholy mists to which their souls will return often in the years to come.

Students Still Read Good Books

To be fair, the headline that caused the typical dustup on social media had a wee hint of clickbait to it.  People were despairingly/gleefully sharing across the Internet that a high school in Ontario, Canada, had removed books from its library that had been published prior to 2008.  The news originated with this piece, and as you can see from the school board's statement, it is not completely accurate to say the school had purged all books that had been published more than fifteen years ago.

"Books published prior to 2008 that are damaged, inaccurate, or do not have strong circulation data (are not being checked out by students) are removed," said the board in its statement.

If damaged books have strong circulation the board says they can be replaced regardless of publication date, and older titles can stay in the collection if they are "accurate, serve the curriculum, align with board initiatives and are responsive to student interest and engagement."

For all that, I have proof that students still read good, classic books, and do so of their own accord.

A Student Shares a Book

My Latin I students were recently discussing a bit of the life of Julius Caesar.  We had been talking about the fact that he had invaded Britain in the 50s B.C., but had not conquered it, and at the end of class, one of my freshman students brought out his backpack to show me G.A. Henty's Beric the Briton:  A Story of the Roman Invasion.

When I asked him where he had acquired it, he said he had checked it out of our school's library.  It was published in 1892.

Although not every student today reads books published in the 19th century, many do read classic books of their own accord.  Many years ago I noticed one of my students reading Tolstoy after she had turned in her quiz.  When I asked if she were reading it for class, she replied that she was reading for her own pleasure, for, in her words, she figured she would not have time as an adult.  My hunch is that any young person who developed such good reading habits at an early age would have a better than fighting chance to retain them in adulthood.  Only recently another of my students eagerly showed me a delightful edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula published by Chiltern, and this ultimately led to my own purchase of Chiltern's handsome volume of Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad.

 

Books, Time, and Space

Once upon a time I had this shirt and ultimately wore it out.  Not only is there not enough time to read all the books we want, there isn't enough space in any library to house them.  Decisions must be made, but using what criteria?  Whether I choose to feed my mind with the equivalent of junk food or a rich, steak dinner, is entirely up to me, but decisions on which books to make available in a library must address broader concerns.  One way to approach the decision is by choosing in which direction to walk.  As the old saying puts it, if you don't know where you're going, any road out of town will do.

Where do parents and teachers want young people to go?  Do we want them only to travel down the roads most familiar to them, ones that are smooth and without any bumps?  Would we like for them to take the road less traveled, as Robert Frost put it?  Do we want them to take the old road, one that has been traversed by those who came before us, those who left clues for how to follow the paths of our own lives?

Many will quickly say that they do not want young people merely to read the easy, the simple, and the unchallenging.  If that is so, then we must make sure they have access to the greatest literature that human beings have created, and they created quite a bit before 2008.

 

In Defense of the Unnecessary

There is a great focus on what is necessary and unnecessary...in school, in government, in life.  Yes, barnacles can grow on a ship and must be scraped off, but if we really tried to live all aspects of life with the bare necessities, our lives would look much different, and I do not think we would like them very much, nor should we.

Art Is The Signature of Man

Aeneas and Dido in Carthage, Claude Lorrain, 1675

In his 1925 book The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton wrote, "Art is the signature of man."  I have spoken and written many times about the scene in Book 1 of Vergil's epic poem the Aeneid in which Aeneas and his friend stand on a hill and overlook the building of the city of Carthage.  Vergil describes what they see in the chronological order of a developing society.  First, they notice the physical construction of buildings and roads, next the establishment of government and laws, and finally the establishment of a theatre.  As I always point out to my students, had the Carthaginians stopped before they built a theatre, theirs would have been an abbreviated society.  Creating things is what we human beings do.  Although some see it so, the artistic act is not an unnecessary one.  It is vital to who we are.

Art For a Purpose

Art, and by that I mean graphic art, musical art, and dramatic art, serves many purposes, but for the purpose of this article, let's focus on its purpose in education.  We all know people, and perhaps are those people ourselves, who come alive when given a creativity opportunity.  In school these are the students who want to draw or write.  They would prefer to act out a story rather than take an exam over it.  It is band or orchestra or choir that helps them get through algebra and history and P.E.

Woodburning of the Colosseum by one of my students

We must provide as many such opportunities for young people as we can, and to do so, we may need to take money from elsewhere, even from areas whose superiority goes unquestioned however much it may go unacknowledged, such as the STEM subjects and sports.  Surely no one would be so monstrous as to say that the needs of one child are less important than those of another or that the abilities of one are insignificant when compared with others, and if we do indeed believe that it would be monstrous to say this, we must put time and money behind our words.  Yet there is more, far more, to the role of art in human life.

Ars Gratia Artis

MGM Logo from 1928-1956

Although the lion has changed over the years, the motto of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM, movie studio has remained Ars Gratia Artis, or "Art For the Sake of Art," and there we find the connection back to Chesterton.  Art need not have a function.  It can, but this is not necessary for its value.  It is valuable simply because it is what human beings do.  We create.  We explore.  We imagine.  In fact, it is our imagination that makes the hypothetical and the conditional possible.  Perhaps electricity can be used to light a home, we say, and from our imagination come the lights we depend on to turn our nights into days.  "If I were in Rome," says a friend, "I would visit the Colosseum," and it is the imagination that makes this conditional sentence possible.  Yet whether or not anyone ever got around to creating a lightbulb or our friend ever managed a trip to Italy is irrelevant.  What matters is our capacity to imagine what is not real.  What matters is our capacity for art, and it is in this that Chesterton is correct.  It is the signature of the human race.

The Insincerity of AI

 

Be warned.  This is an anti-AI blogpost.  If you think AI is the greatest invention since sliced bread, this is not for you.  You should probably just ask ChatGPT to write you an intriguing article about sliced bread and enjoy your day.  If you continue reading, you do so having been warned.

Genuine Pottery

Greek Black-Figure Pottery, Art Institute of Chicago (photograph mine)

Although most etymologists today say otherwise, it has for centuries been suggested that the English word "sincere" is derived from the Latin phrase sine cera, meaning "without wax."  To what this phrase referred has been a matter of as much debate, with one theory being that unscrupulous potters would fill cracks in their wares with wax, prompting better artisans to advertise their works as being made sine cera.  Regardless of the actual etymology, there is, of course, the desire on the part of artists and craftsmen to promote their efforts as genuine, and there is just as much desire on the part of patrons and customers to enjoy authentic works of art.  When we refer to a cheap knockoff, we do not use the adjective "cheap" so much to make a distinction with an expensive knockoff, but rather to denigrate the item as much as possible.  "Cheap" in this sense is an intensifier expressing our disgust with an inferior product.

It is in this sense, then, that AI is not sincere.  It is a cheap knockoff.  Now that it exists, we can put it to some beneficial uses, but at best these are mean and mundane.  When it comes to what truly matters, as in art so in all other things, we will always prefer what is real.

A Tale of Two Paintings

Many years ago, my wife and I led a group of high school students on a tour of Italy.  While in Rome, I snapped a picture of the rostra, the speaker's platform from which great orators like Cicero once delivered their speeches.  The mother of one of my students was an artist and used my photograph as the basis for a beautiful painting that she gave me.  It graces my classroom to this day.

Now, let's take a look at what AI can do.  I typed the following prompt into ChatGPT, "Create a watercolor painting of the rostra in the Roman forum viewed at ground level from the perspective of a person looking slightly to the left."  This is what it gave me.

It is not bad, of course, and had I played around with the prompt, I could probably have coaxed it into producing something like the painting my student's mother created, but no matter what, it would be, at best, a cheap knockoff.  It would be insincere.  My student's mother had used the photo from her son's teacher on their trip to Italy as the basis for her own conception of the scene, a conception she brought into reality from her desire to give a gift.  Her painting was a human endeavor from start to finish, and not only does the fact of the humanity make all the difference in the world, but that humanity is reflected in the final product.

That's Not What I Asked

Not long ago I was doing a bit of research on the Latin words indignata, vita, and Aeneid in JSTOR, the online repository of academic journals.  I was not aware that a new AI button had been installed, much less that it could be switched off, so I was surprised when an AI summary popped up to the right of the page.

Now, here is my beef.  First, it took my three-word search and turned it into a question that I did not ask. 

You: How is "(((indignata) and (vita)) AND (Aeneid)) AND disc:(classicalstudies-discipline)" related to this text?

Second, I had not been aware of this feature or the fact that its default setting was to be turned on, thus my feeling of intrusion into my research.  Finally, the serendipitous nature of research is that one can be scanning an article for one thing and discover something else useful.  An AI summary robs me of that.  Of course, I will turn off this feature, but given that it is the default, this troubles me for our students.

What Is It Good For?

In his famous 1970 protest song "War," Edwin Starr asked, "War, what is it good for?"  I would not go quite so far regarding AI as to give his answer of "absolutely nothing," but mine would be close.

AI can crunch data.  It can discover patterns.  It can create things that serve certain basic functions.  But when we want that which expresses truth, goodness, and beauty, the best expressions come from those uniquely created to understand, appreciate, and share them...you and me.