![\"Pinturicchio](\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pinturicchio_-_The_Return_of_Odysseus_-_WGA17830.jpg\")
\nEach age makes its own version of the Odyssey. Here’s Pinturicchio’s The Return of Ulysses (1508-09).\nOn a train trip West from Tokyo on the Chuo line you pass by the Northern slopes of Mount Fuji, but from the angles offered it’s hard to see the summit. This was doubly the case when we did it on the way to the Nagano prefecture because that early September day was rainy and misty.
\nI pointed my phone’s camera in the vague direction of the peak but I was guessing and it wasn’t worth pressing the shutter. There was nothing to see. Mount Fuji’s looming presence expressed itself as an absence beyond viewing.
\nIn a charity store yesterday I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This contains a couple of additional accounts of the poet’s famous travels, including ‘The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton’, in which Bashō writes:
\n\n\n💬 “I crossed the barrier-gate of Hakone on a rainy day. All the mountains were deeply buried behind the clouds.
\nIn a way
\nIt was fun
\nNot to see Mount Fuji
\nIn foggy rain.”
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Well, sometimes it’s comforting to know you’re not the first to miss out – and to be reminded that missing out might just hold its own subtle pleasure. This perspective might lack credibility unless you recognise that most days, as with Hokusai’s famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji, it’s almost impossible not to see that sacred mountain.
\n![\"Auto-generated](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/97469/2026/narrow-road-cover-m.jpg\")
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"date_published": "2026-09-20T22:17:57+10:00",
"url": "https://writingslowly.com/2026/09/20/the-consolations-of-literature.html",
"tags": ["article","Quote","books","Shu Ha Ri"],
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"id": "http://writingslowly.micro.blog/2026/08/03/the-strange-return-of-the.html",
"title": "The strange return of the continuous need to make sense of things",
"content_html": "\nThe idea of reading continuous narrative may be relatively recent. For example, the Bible is arranged in many places with a long sequential narrative, and some have seen it as ‘the greatest story ever told’. But liturgical practice, both Jewish and Christian, is to split this extended narrative up into excerpted readings (’the reading’ or ’the lesson’; ’the portion’ or parashah).
\nThe novel, meanwhile, encourages readers to assume continuous reading is the natural way of things, even though many novels even into the 20th century were actually serialised on first publication. Here’s Robert Darnton on the significance of fragmentary reading.
\n\n\n“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your own personality. . . By selecting and arranging snippets from a limitless stock of literature, early modern Englishmen gave free play to a semi-conscious process of ordering experience. The elective affinities that bound their selection into patterns reveal an epistemology — a process of knowing — at work below the surface”
\n
\n— (Robert Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” New York Review of Books 47 (20)[December 21, 2000] 82, 86).
I note this because these days it feels like the age of fragmentary reading has well and truly returned. Every medium has cracked into splinters. Along with this fragmentation comes a revival of the need for a continuous effort to make sense of an increasingly disordered experience. As a result there’s a great need to work out new ways of knowing.
\nSee also: From fragments you can build a greater whole
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-08-03T22:50:24+10:00", "url": "https://writingslowly.com/2026/08/03/the-strange-return-of-the.html", "tags": ["Quote","Atomic Notes"], "attachments": [ { "url": "https://writingslowly.com/uploads/2026/94ca37461f.m4a", "mime_type": "audio/mpeg" } ] }, { "id": "http://writingslowly.micro.blog/2026/07/07/odysseus-a-name-that-spells.html", "title": "Odysseus: A name that spells trouble", "content_html": "\nSince we’re currently lost somewhere in the middle of wars that seemingly have no end-point, and arguably no point, I wonder just what film director Christopher Nolan will make of The Odyssey, his blockbuster movie of which comes out mid-2026.
\nAfter I watched another recent movie version of the story, The Return, I found out about the work of psychologist Jonathan Shay with Vietnem veterans. He wrote two books linking the works of Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – with the modern experience of warfare and with the travails of homecoming.
\nTwo quotes from Jonathan Shay’s work stood out particularly. First, this one about war-induced PTSD:
\n\n\n“Combat veterans with unhealed PTSD have the greatest difficulty conceiving of any struggle apart from killing and dying. Passionate struggle conducted within rules of safety and fairness simply doesn’t make sense to them or seems a hollow charade. For them it is psychologically impossible to win a struggle without killing or to lose without dying, and they do not want to do either.” – Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam.
\n
This was depicted brilliantly and chillingly in The Return, which premiered in 2024. Ralph Feinnes’ Odysseus seems both haunted by his violent past, and doomed to relive it. Classicist Joel Christensen didn’t love The Return, and I understand why he called it a shabby, Cliff’s Notes version of the Odyssey. But I felt the movie at least illuminated some of the PTSD aspects of war that Shay describes – enduring trauma less as a disorder than as an injury.
\nThen there was this quote, which really made me think:
\n\n\n“A shared narrative future – as expressed in such statements as “Yes, I’ll come to the picnic next Friday” – defines socially shared predictability of behavior. Prolonged contact with the enemy teaches that predictability is fatal. Being unpredictable is a basic survival skill in combat, where the enemy is ever observant. Many of the veterans in our program take different routes to the clinic every time they come.” – Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam.
\n
On reading this, I thought of the epithets, the numerous descriptions applied to Odysseus. In The Odyssey he is introduced as ’the man of many ways’ (polytropos). The meaning of this name has been argued about ever since antiquity. Is it a compliment, as in ‘well-turned’, or a criticism, as in ‘shifty’?
\nEither way there’s a certain elusiveness to Odysseus. The point is, I’d never before encountered the idea that perhaps this unpredictability might relate directly to the trauma of the Trojan War he has survived while seeing his comrades perish (and often being the cause of their deaths too). I used to think it meant he was cunningly shape-shifting, crafting his words and actions to be ‘all things to everyone’. But if so, why exactly is he like this? When I think of the veterans taking multiple paths to the clinic, the image sheds light on Odysseus’s detour-heavy, periegetic journey home, and his frequent reluctance to admit to his hosts who he is. He’s trying to survive the war, even long after it’s over. The Return captured this well, I felt. Odysseus doesn’t so much remain in the shadows as become a shadow himself, returned to the palace but reluctant to claim his place, as though he knows his name can only ever mean trouble1.
\nWell, another year, another interpretation of Homer. Apparently Christopher Nolan’s movie cost more than ten times as much as Uberto Pasolini’s film did. It will be interesting to see whether it’s ten times as incisive.
\n\nEach age makes its own version of the Odyssey. Here’s Pinturicchio’s The Return of Ulysses (1508-09).
Further reading:
\nAustin, Norman. “Name Magic in the ‘Odyssey.’” California Studies in Classical Antiquity, vol. 5, 1972, pp. 1–19. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/2…
\nChristensen, Joel. “Terrible, Wonderful Odysseus: The Meanings of his Epithets, His Name(s) and How We Read Him.” Sententiae Antiquiae, 2018.
\nChristensen, Joel P. Why Odysseus?: Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. Palgrave Macmillan, 2026.
\nHomer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson, W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
\nPucci, Pietro. Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad.” Cornell University Press, 1987. JSTOR.
\nShay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Atheneum, 1994.
\nShay, Jonathan. Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Scribner, 2002.
\nSee also: No Other Odysseus - ‘a collection of links to materials on Odysseus and the Odyssey.’
\nI’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. It’s a short and accessible introduction to the concept, available now.
\nAnd if you liked this article, why not subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email digest?
\n\nThat the name of Odysseus should spell Trouble was first suggested in Dimock, George E., Jr. “The Name of Odysseus.” The Hudson Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 1956, pp. 52–70. ↩︎
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