Is the Odysseus Discourse on X an Op?

 

No cap, if the commenter is just fooling with us, this is totally goated. After all the "Gen Z" don't write cursive, don't write checks, can't read entire novels, don't know what a rotary phone or a Walkman are stuff, pretending not to know the first thing about Homer would be, um, EPIC!

How does Christopher Nolan even find these wild things man? Does he even speak like, Greek? 

What even is this:

Yes, because when Ulysses, as he was then called, was a big old book in the early 20th century, it was written by an entire American not a notable Irish...

Grrr. I do not believe this discourse. I picked up The Iliad and The Odyssey both in one of their many, many English translations, from the used books at a Salvation Army thrift store when I was like, eight years old. I already had some acquaintance from sword 'n'sandals movies and Classic comics what I was looking at. I wanted to read the Big Kid Books. The serious grownup literature.  Are there young people seeing "Odessey SUV's" and hearing about "Achilles' tendons" and going around with no idea what those names are all about?

What Faustian bargain has our youth unaware of Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships?  What have they gotten in return? Joe Rogan and Mr. Beast? 

What do kids get read to them these days? Do they know what the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales even are? 

I feel weirdly conservative when I say that kids should learn of Achilles and his wrath or Odysseus and his peregrinations and feel like Keats looking into Chapman's Homer--like some part of the ancient past had the power to totally blow their little minds. Knowing ancient mythology and the names of ancient heroes is only additive for appreciating so much of what came after: Frankenstein in the context of Golems and Galatea, the Wicked Witches of Oz through Circe. Bryan Johnson and his desire not to die through Gilgamesh. 

Every human story spawns a replay of an old game in which not a single one of us is an NPC, but all of us are everyday heroes, with a tie to something greater than ourselves. Is that the missing puzzle piece? Are the youth fooled by false narratives because they haven't been schooled on the existing really cool ones? 

These kids today, they don't know what the old heads have been saying. This is why they are so disrespectful. Which I know from my reading goes back at least to Aristotle. At least! 

But now, these kids need to know about gorgons outside of Versace labels and all that. (They can't be missing out on The Kraken, Percy Jackson, I mean, these ancient stories are still out there--anime, and whatnot, right?) I'm happy to send kids to Padraic Colum and Edna St. Vincent Millay (I'm an old soul!) and let them go wander into a world where we had belles lettres before no one knew how to write thank you notes. What harm would it even do?

(None.)