In an interview on Love, War and Longing

This is a strange one. Homer’s Odyssey.

I first read this when I had pneumonia when I was about nine. I was at my parents’ beach house and my brothers were going in and out to the beach and I was stuck on the sofa for a month. Can you imagine? It was the Odyssey in comic book form. My dad bought me the Iliad and the Odyssey, but I found the Iliad kind of boring – there were all these ships going in and out and a lot of waiting around. War is like that really – a lot of waiting around. But the Odyssey was wonderful. I read it again in high school and I think you need to focus on it, you need a kind of mindfulness to read it. I can’t take it all in at once.

How is it about longing?

It’s about wanting to go home! The thing I loved about Ulysses was that he’s so in love with adventure and with love. He stays on the island with Calypso for seven years and he’s so close really to Penelope, who’s there waiting for him and knitting her shroud all this time. And he keeps getting delayed, finally by Calypso. I am such a useless, sappy romantic – I think with my heart not my head – and I love this longing for home but the kind of unreality of it, the truth that you can never really go back. But he does get home! It’s a love story and it’s about our…conflicting longings, I suppose.

In an interview on Living Prudently

This is a good point to begin on your book selection with The Odyssey.

Yes, speaking of war. Here we have the introduction in Western literature to the concept of prudence, embodied in the character of Odysseus. You could even conceive of The Iliad and The Odyssey as a two-volume study of the nature of prudence and imprudence, because it begins with the imprudence of Achilles. Achilles has a fit about something that in the context of war is an extremely low priority. He’s pissed off because he doesn’t get some slave girl as a prize. He makes a low priority a top priority, which is one of the hallmarks of imprudence. And he does so in service of self, which is another.

And let’s not forget Paris’s act of monumental imprudence in stealing Helen.

There you go. And then you have Odysseus, in contrast. The epithets about Odysseus are always about his cunning and his prudence. In the first book of The Odyssey he is referred to as a “master tactician”. He’s always careful, and we see that most of all in his return to Ithaca and his wife. He doesn’t just waltz in, he comes in disguise. There’s no equivalent of a Western hero in modern times who would do the same. They would walk in with guns blazing. But Odysseus is careful. Why? Because he doesn’t know what he’s going to find.

Odysseus is the great hero of prudence in all of our literature. He thinks before he acts, and bases that action on caution. And his wife, Penelope, is the heroine of prudence in literature. She’s a single mother, she doesn’t know if her husband is coming back or not, and she has all of these suitors. She’s in an extremely vulnerable position – how can she say “yes” to one of the suitors when her husband might come home, but how can she say “no” and possibly invoke their wrath – so her best option is to keep them hanging on. That’s why she weaves and unweaves her tapestry at the loom every night. She says she will choose one of her suitors as husband when she finishes her tapestry, but she has no plan ever to finish it.

And then devises an impossible test with a bow that the suitors are meant to string.

Exactly. All in the service of delaying them. In my book on decision making, one of the guidelines that comes through very strongly is: Don’t decide until you have to. That’s what Penelope does. Let me read to you a short passage of hers that captures that note of prudence. This is in Book 19, and she’s talking about a dream. She hasn’t acknowledged that Odysseus is Odysseus yet. She wants to test him first. He tells her about a dream and she says:

“Friend, many and many a dream is mere confusion, a cobweb of no consequence at all. Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: One gateway of honest horn, and one of ivory. Issuing by the ivory gate are dreams of glimmering illusion, fantasies, but those that come through solid polished horn may be borne out, if mortals only know them.”

These are not the words of a foolish woman. This is the voice of someone who knows that you have to test the promptings of your heart. That the dreams that come from you, or seem to be given to you, might be given by good or bad forces, might be helpful or destructive. They have to be tested by thought and experience. And that is essential to prudence.

Yet so many other Greek heroes are exemplars of imprudence and hubris.

The impulsiveness of Greek heroes is legendary. Just look at Oedipus. Here is a man who was given a prophecy that he was going to kill his father and sleep with his mother. A minimally prudent person, hearing that prophecy and believing it as a good Greek of his day should have, would not then kill an older man and sleep with an older woman. Yet he did, and that was his downfall. Antigone, on the other hand, was faced with a tragic choice about whether to bury her brother with the honour he deserved in spite of the king having forbidden it. She was prudent because she did what she felt was best, with full and thoughtful awareness of the terrible consequences of her action.