Homecoming King: Calypso, Nausicaa, and Athena

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We are truly on the home stretch now--folding up the frame story around Odysseus' adventures, we can see there are three women that walk beside him on his way back to Ithaca. Each of them, in her own way, must love him without holding on to him, as he goes through the painful process of recovering who he is after all the accretions of war and wandering have been stripped away. It's an epic drama but also, in some deeply essential way, the story of all of us.

Check out iBreviary: https://www.ibreviary.org/en/

Watch my conversation with Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMRT2ZbXa2s

Order Light of the Mind, Light of the World (and rate it five stars): https://a.co/d/2QccOfM

Catch up on my livestream with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com/p/new-livestream-october-7-6pm-et

Simon Netchev’s Odyssey Map: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/15906/odysseus-ten-year-journey-home

Transcript

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0:00.0	So I try very hard on this podcast soul I am a corny corny
0:20.3	guy so I hope you appreciate all the effort I'm putting in to keep the cornyness level at least a little bit restrained on this show.
0:28.0	But this week I just couldn't help. I tried really hard, but I could not help bringing out one of my favorite corny
0:35.0	quotes that you see on like pushboard signs outside of churches. It's that bad. It's by this
0:39.9	guy, Ram Doss, who's kind of a new-age guru, and he has this saying, we're all just walking each other back home.
0:47.0	And I don't know whether you agree with that in general, maybe we get into it a little bit, but this week I do want to introduce you to the
0:55.9	three women who helped most of all to walk Odysseus back home. We are all right. We are well and truly on the home stretch of our journey through the Iliad. We have completed the famous
1:15.7	gauntlet of trials that ended with Scylla and Coribdis and the cattle of the sun.
1:21.1	When we last left Odysseus, he had been shipwrecked by a thunderbolt
1:25.2	from Zeus killing all the rest of his men but him and he was washed up on the island with my second
1:31.2	favorite name in the poem Ojaja, which belongs to the witch-nymph goddess
1:37.0	Calypso. And it was Calypso, you may recall, who set Odysseus free on his way to the Theatians. So this whole
1:46.9	journey, this whole story that we've been telling for the past several weeks is the story
1:51.1	that Odysseus tells to the Fiations when they receive him.
1:55.0	And so it's sort of a flashback and it's right there lumped in the middle of the poem.
2:00.0	It is the core of the poem, but it is a flashback story.
2:03.7	There's a giant frame narrative.
2:06.2	The whole rest of the poem is in some sense a frame narrative.
2:09.0	And this is what makes the poem itself pollutropost.
2:12.2	That's the adjective that gets applied to Odysseus, that he's a man of many ways,
2:16.2	but the poem also is a poem of many twists and turns. Its threads are looped and folded back in on themselves and we have talked extensively as we go through
2:25.8	this poem together about why that is, why it's important that the poem is constructed
	...

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