“Assignment: acquire and read the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid before September.” It is May again. The month I read this demand in tiny text sprawled across my computer screen last year. I joined the HUM sequence. After all, it’s the only rational way to enter college as a humanities student: I would encounter these books anyway; I might as well read them all at once. “Acquire and read.” My body shuddered. “Acquire and read.” What an unlawful presupposition of skill that no first-year student should be challenged with. No. I was still too intellectually averse, too indolent, too fresh for this imperative. I fought my impulses, reconfiguring my placid, melting brain. I made a schedule entitled: “Epic Reading Schedule,” which mapped out, down to each day, how much I would “have” to read.
My epigraph (and of course there was an epigraph) to the schedule was a line I plucked from a quick Google search of “motivating quotes from Homer,” which spit out: “Be still, my heart; thou hast known worse than this… but still thou didst endure…” supposedly from the Odyssey but from what translation, of what oration, I do not know, nor did I care.
Except for the reading, I had no plans because I believed that this would be my last summer of freedom—free to languish in my own desires, destroy any semblance of a routine, and never have to think about my future. “The summer passed idly by”—is a phrase someone might say if they want to skip over a part of their life they feel is unimportant. I am a part of this tradition. Yet, it was not idle. It was assiduous. A huge change was impending. This reading schedule ended my languid intentions. I “assigned” myself… I echo Montaigne, here, falsely: “I assay myself.” Of fullness and nothingness all at once, my summer of well-being and pleasure was bogged down by only twenty pages of reading a day. This was to be my degree, I thought to myself. “Do I enjoy this?” The question lingers and falls flat on my own forehead—each book crashes again and again into itself.
The Odyssey was nostalgic, the Iliad mystified me, and the Aeneid destroyed me.
If I had to simplify the experience of reading each of these texts (listen as I just said “text,” instead of book), I would give them these attributions. I had only ever encountered the Odyssey before, and as it unfolds, it reminds you of just how much of a grasp this story has on storytelling itself—I think of Penelope’s loom—another voice of Homer.
You know how you can stare at a bard in wonder—
Trained by the gods to sing and hold men spellbound—
How you can long to sit there, listening, all your life
When the man begins to sing. So he charmed my heart
The Odyssey, Homer
And so, my heart was charmed too. The grandeur, the homecoming, the sign of Odysseus’ scar. I felt all of it imprint on me.
The Iliad sunk me into a pit of names and violence. I could barely construct an image of such atrocities that seemed to have been extinguished the second they were enacted.
I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone
through;
I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my
children.
The Iliad, Homer
This violence is not comparable. “Never say the word ‘relatable,’” professors would warn. I doubted, though. Is the charmed feeling not the sense of connection across time? I do not have children, but I do have hands. I am not in battle, but that does not mean nobody else is. I challenge the way we view history separately—even the fictitious kind, the mythological kind. During the first few precepts I liked to make the point that we need myths. We need something primordial that we can hold on to as a baseline. To anchor us in a story we can respond to. She has Helen’s eyes. The war is not over—Priam’s palace has not been sieged.
When I read the Aeneid, I felt like my sense of dimension was shattered. How do I show this? Like finding out, for the first time, what little it takes to make a pinhole camera. You can take a picture with an old aluminum can, some electrical tape, and photo paper. That images could be constructed, seemingly, out of dead materials. The classic tradition, what was a burnt-flame to me, could be a wildfire.
The Aeneid was crafted meticulously and sufferingly by one Vergil, or Virgil, or Virgilio as Dante spells it. This, I learned, was of a completely different tradition. Virgil wrote 800 years after the Iliad first appeared. His story was for political glorification:
With Mars’ help [Romulus] will build Rome’s
Walls and name the Romans for himself.
On them I set no boundaries of time or space:
I’ve granted empire without end.
The Aeneid, Virgil
Rome under Augustus is not gone. I learned how stories can be, and continue to be, co-opted by / subservient to / accommodated to / commodified by / whatever political power is in place. Or, would like to be. But Virgil was not merely a propagandist. He buried, beneath his verse of never-ending rule, a critique of Augustus. If one pays attention to the language, that is. Critical Thinking. I am charmed again.
When the course began, rheumy-eyed students saw their new lives in an auditorium of the greatest minds. The first lectures dislocated my understanding of passing time “in class.” They were closer to orations than regurgitations of course topics. Precept was a little less magnificent. Yet, we still probed and questioned and set out to give our opinions. The atmosphere was competitive: each student straining to speak, raising their hands after every breath of another, so that they could give their meditation on St. Augustine’s Confessions. I wish we could have stayed close to the words, but it was more fashionable to speak generally—connect idiosyncratic allusions to even more obscure ones than those found in the text. We might use the word “pretentious.” We might not. I still struggle with the line between self-righteousness and intelligence. I count myself as a part of this pack of book-eaters.
Fate was the question of the first semester. We were all concerned with it. How was it decided? By who? When would it change? How swiftly, how formidable, this current that caused and resolved all the patricide and incest of the Theban plays? I did not mind the dialogue, but I did not appreciate our lingering on it. We could question fate in anything. I did not understand why everyone cared so much about it— if by chance or control, things came to pass. We followed this thread all the way towards Dante’s Divine Comedy, which marked the end of the first semester. When, at the end of the last lecture, our professor told us that Dante ends each part of his Commedia with the word ‘stelle.’
“Look up,” he told us, “is what Dante is asking of us all”—the stars. Maybe we were in a contract with the celestial. I had no bearing on anything beyond me. Nobody tells you how incredibly independent HUM is. Most of the time is spent alone, reading. A given, due to the nature of the class, but the experience of reading isn’t mentioned except for how time-consuming it is. I loved the silent, lonesome, reading the most.
First semester, gone. I spent winter break with Milton, Cervantes, and Christine de Pizan—Marco Polo too. More time in stasis, reading all night, because I could not bring myself to do so until the sun went down.
I guess I should recount a bit about the assignments, or assignment, in the singular. We were asked to complete ten close-reading analyses. Let a passage come to you, they say, one that is striking and mysterious, that requires more time to understand how it works and everything there is to wonder about. Some passages came fast. Others, I couldn’t bring myself to let go of. Once you have completed a close-reading, the passage is so translucent, it lacks the ineffability that brought you to it in the first place. So I keep those with me that I do not wish to gleam completely. They are too tender.
—in losing our fear of man we have also lost our love for him, our respect for him, our hope in him and even our will to be man. That sight of man now makes us tired — what is nihilism today if it is not that? … We are tired of humans …
On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche
And I am tired, too tired to complete all the readings, then, what is this for? I ask myself this question sometimes as I scan the pages, as my comprehension fails. At this point, I usually go to bed, and the problem is over in the morning. That’s what the HUM sequence does to you. It feels inexhaustible and then resolves itself in a single hour of lecture, to then begin again, and again.
However, this cycle of unending paper deadlines and the next book to look towards on the syllabus has stopped. The last week, if one could categorize the uncategorizable—how to condense thousands of texts of the contemporary era into a single week?—would not reject the name: The Death of HUM. Due, in part, to the funerary texture of the reading list: love fail, Beloved, and Memorial. But, this death is not a common one. Unlike the dead who accept the ground they were buried in. This passing of history becomes a specter—a haunting. The presence of these texts will echo in a misplaced step on the roads of our lives because we heard the directions whispered to us from familiar voices. So, we pass on from this course. Leaving behind the constant readings, metrical analyses, and oratorios we call a lecture. Unlike the last lines of the sequence,
Like when god throws a star
And everyone looks up
To see that whip of sparks
And then it’s gone
Memorial, Alice Oswald
We will continue to see the irradiated dust from this shooting star until we cease to see at all. And even then, as the blind poet John Milton can confirm, we still
…may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
Paradise Lost, Milton
Michael Grasso is a contributing writer and communications manager for the Nassau Weekly.
