it’s so good is the thing. like the parallels are insanely ripe for the picking. hannah being edgar’s adopted sister and falling for grace, the woman he’s going to marry. ulysses being feng’s half-brother and falling for vivian, the woman he’s already married to. hannah reeling grace into a month-long affair and kissing her senseless on that bed. ulysses reeling vivian into dance competitions all across the country and kissing her senseless on that beach. hannah planning on going to sea for a year when grace turns her away. ulysses traveling all over the world to escape the fact that vivian left him. hannah and ulysses both have two targets in front of them during their shared scene together and their arrow can only hit one of them. which one will it be?
for this course I’m teaching I selected both Iliad 24 and Odyssey 22 and it wasn’t planned but there’s something about the contrast that is really striking - I think the Odyssey is often seen as a softer and more accessible epic than the Iliad, but on this reread I’m struck by how Iliad 24 is Homeric epic at its most empathetic, and Odyssey 22 is Homeric epic at its most coldly, jarringly brutal. and there’s something to be said the way that the poem about rage ends with an act of profound and complicated humanity, while the poem about a complicated man (nearly) ends with an act of profound rage
thinking more about this and the dynamics of space also. Achilles’ tent is no proper oikos, and yet when Priam arrives there Achilles nevertheless treats him like a xenos at the doorstep of any good host - he takes him in and feeds him and gives him lodging for the night. and then Odysseus gets home to his real, proper oikos and he fills it with so many corpses that we almost forget for a second that we’re not still on the plain of Troy
One day she came back grinning her horsey grin, her hair all tangled and her clothes covered in mud, clutching a raggedy bunch of purple and green flowers for Father.
…
he only hugged her and thanked her for the flowers.
gameraboy
Saturn Seen from Enceledus, Beyond Jupiter- The Worlds of Tomorrow book illustration, 1972 by Chesley Bonestell
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