The Odyssey: A Prelude
Finally, I’m going to watch Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey . I never managed to read the classic though many characters have fascinated me time and again. Odysseus stayed with me right from my undergrad days when I read Lord Tennyson’s poem on him. The aging king, as presented by Tennyson, rejects a quiet, sedentary life in the palace. “I cannot rest from travel,” he says, “I will drink life to the lees…” I loved that passion for life, for adventure and the quest for wisdom. The line “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” has remained in my memory from the college classroom up to this day. I know well that Nolan’s Odysseus is not Tennyson’s Ulysses. But I’m sure I’ll love the movie, a journey into the psyche of a man who ruled the mythological milieu of an ancient civilisation. How much of the wars that Odysseus fought were historical? I don’t know. Human beings were always driven by predatory expansionist drives. They wanted to extract the wealth that belonged to o...
