Ulysses

And you talk about that in the essay, that, you know, words and ideas have been, um, so much of your life, and you're worried about, uh, losing that.

But you had a great section from, uh, Alfred Lloyd, uh, Lord Tennyson's great poem, "Ulysses," that was saying kind of this, this may all sound dire, um, but the promise that there's something at the core of all of us that endures, as you put it.

So can you read that little section of the poem, "Ulysses"?

Yeah.

So, uh, Tennyson was a Victorian poet.

I have always read him as a misplaced Romantic poet, [laughs] a poet, and have written about that in, uh, in the past.

And so U-Ulysses, uh, the setting here, he's at the end, at the near of his end of his life.

Uh, and he's reminisce-reminiscing, and he starts by saying that, "Little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with a..." Sorry about this.

Three papers.

The first one blew my mind, Dante's Ulysses and the Unman by a Mr. Anthony Kline.

So as a brief aside, one of the fun things about this conference was being around a zillion people who spoke fluent Lewis.

[laughs] That's so true.

Well, at least the serious scholars did.

I think there were some references, though, that could fly over the head or you might not know it.

Now, when I hear Dante's Ulysses and the Unman, I know exactly what he's gonna talk about, but I can imagine there are people who don't.

So as we're talking through this podcast, I think we are gonna try and explain some of these things, so catch me if I use one of those Lewisisms that needs to be explained.

Infinite knowledge that steers one off course, diverts one from his humanity, robs one of the will to navigate the journey home to the human community and the relations that define us.

What the sirens offer is so powerful that later literary versions of the Odyssey story in Dante's Inferno and Tennyson's great poem Ulysses represent Odysseus as choosing never to return home or having once gotten there, setting out again to follow now is like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

What's left behind on the siren shore are the remnants of those who have yielded, as Sears describes.

A great heap of moldering men, the skins shriveling around their bones.

His favorite book is the Oxford Book of English Verse that he reads every night before he goes to bed.

And I recall that in one episode, he at length quoted Ulysses.

This was long before I knew what...

the poem was or who Tennyson was.

But somehow I had this idea as a kid watching this, this was going to be what being an adult would be like that I would, I would have all these poems bouncing around my head and I would just pick one out for that would be appropriate at whatever time.

You know, since then I have learned that I'm autistic and that's a very autistic thought to have.

I think that if I actually started quoting Ulysses unprompted people would look at me as though we were very strange.

I think certainly after this many years on this earth, you've realized that would actually be a real mood killer.