"It always struck me that these gods are just playing, and they don’t really care — you’re just a pet insect to them" King Lear, Gloucester: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport".
Wonderful and rish disctussion! As a collection of stories, the poem always seems to me to bring front and center the inner struggle with what going home really means. Does it mean actually going home? Or, does it mean bringing everything from home to the tirp you're on so actually going home isn't necessary. We assum travel differently than people did in the past. As recently as a few hundred years ago, when people crossed the atlantic that was often it. They weren't actually going to physically go back where they came from. Instead they wove home into their heer and now. I though Nolan did a good job with this. Loved listening to an hour of your discussion. Thanks.
I’m loving this. I spent a good 25 years (and growing) of my life reading these books and asking these questions. I love that this has become “The Discourse” of the summer
The line that stuck with me: "the seat isn't real — who enforces it? Nobody's coming." That's basically the thesis of every sovereignty debate I've been reading this summer, just compressed into a rap verse about Telemachus. It also connects to Roel's point about resisting the urge to rationalize the Trojan War into trade-route strategy — we do the same thing to sovereignty itself, retroactively inventing material logic for what was often just about status, honor, and who could make people believe they were in charge. Ithaca without institutions and the Concert of Europe with them are both, underneath, the same question: does power come from a title, or from whether anyone still shows up to enforce it?
My main takeaway from this (awesome and lively) discussion is that I need to pre-order Jordan’s original rendition of the Odyssey ;)
"It always struck me that these gods are just playing, and they don’t really care — you’re just a pet insect to them" King Lear, Gloucester: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport".
Wonderful and rish disctussion! As a collection of stories, the poem always seems to me to bring front and center the inner struggle with what going home really means. Does it mean actually going home? Or, does it mean bringing everything from home to the tirp you're on so actually going home isn't necessary. We assum travel differently than people did in the past. As recently as a few hundred years ago, when people crossed the atlantic that was often it. They weren't actually going to physically go back where they came from. Instead they wove home into their heer and now. I though Nolan did a good job with this. Loved listening to an hour of your discussion. Thanks.
I’m loving this. I spent a good 25 years (and growing) of my life reading these books and asking these questions. I love that this has become “The Discourse” of the summer
The line that stuck with me: "the seat isn't real — who enforces it? Nobody's coming." That's basically the thesis of every sovereignty debate I've been reading this summer, just compressed into a rap verse about Telemachus. It also connects to Roel's point about resisting the urge to rationalize the Trojan War into trade-route strategy — we do the same thing to sovereignty itself, retroactively inventing material logic for what was often just about status, honor, and who could make people believe they were in charge. Ithaca without institutions and the Concert of Europe with them are both, underneath, the same question: does power come from a title, or from whether anyone still shows up to enforce it?