Ulysses

I was asked to teach Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to my seniors this semester as part of a curriculum exchange across classes.

Glad to do it. 

Breaking away from the tried and true is always a worthwhile experiment in the classroom. Any such exercise will either validate what you are already doing or give you something new and effective. Also, teaching a Romantic poem to a British Literature class is like teaching equations in algebra: it comes standard.

The Romantics, primarily John Keats, sparked the love of poetry that eventually saw me teaching the stuff, anyway. My early poems took after his — meaning, to modern readers, they were stilted and antiquated.   

It wasn’t until the last day that I taught “Ulysses”, and it wound up being a good wrap-up poem. In teaching it, I learned it’s a good first day poem, too, especially for seniors in high school. You likely have heard this poem before, even if only in the movie Dead Poets Society. Tennyson assumes the voice of a battle-trodden Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca. I asked my students to read the first stanza and consider: “What does Odysseus think of retirement.” The answer is pretty clear: he’s bored. And what is his answer for that boredom? The open sea. The one thing he wanted while sailing home was to see his wife and kingdom and now that his wife and kingdom are once again before him, what does he want? He wants to sail again. 

Tennyson writes, “Come, my friends, / ‘T is not too late to seek a new world,” and “…for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset,” and “… that which we are, we are; / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” 

I’ve heard this story before. That’s why I ask my students what happens when great athletes retire. They often want to come back for one more season, right? This is despite the irrefutable evidence that they have passed their prime and cannot dominate the league as they once did. 

This desire to strive for greatness past the bounds of greatness is everywhere in our culture. It is, I remind the class, the premise of Dr. Dre’s 2001 album. Then I remember my students weren’t born in 2001 and realize, in the process, it’s not too late for me to listen to some Drake album and find this theme, this restless pursuit, in a more contemporary form. And there it was on Scorpion in a song called “Nonstop.”

I asked the students to consider their current situation as an example. They are seniors in high school. It is January, the end of their penultimate semester. What is the one thing they have to worry about? College. 

Then, I ask them to go to college in their imagination. What will be the one thing people will be pressing them about then? Career.

Once a few years into their career, what will come next? Wife, kids, home, mortgage?

Before they know it, they will be spending their waking hours worrying about how to save to send their own kids to college, impressing on a new generation of humans the curse of foregoing today for the worry of the future.

Why can Odysseus, upon finally returning home, only think of leaving? Because the process of greatness is what the great ones love most. No one can be happy if they work for a paycheck. No career is fruitful if all it affords is stable retirement. God did not make us to live on a linear plane. God made us to seek new worlds. 

I’ve enjoyed working with one student, in particular, this year. This student is not super excited about literature, mind you, but he is, in my opinion, a mathematical genius. And he’ll be off to study math at an honors college next year, to boot. 

He described how social media’s popularity can be measured mathematically. Take a Tik-Tok story, for example (and pardon anything lost in translation here, I’m not on social media). For a story on Tik-Tok to make sense, the viewer has to be immersed in a flurry of signaling. Think, for a minute, that you can quantify how many signals are received per second. The most received signals would drive the popularity of the story. There is another variable, too. The signal is amplified if the person receiving it thinks he is receiving a privileged code — in essence, he is receiving something his parents wouldn’t understand. 

This drive to flood receptors with newer and newer signals explains why the ‘generation gap’ is accelerating in smaller intervals. What makes my generation yell, “Okay, Boomer,” is what is making a generation much closer in age to mine yell, “Okay, Millennial.” 

This student is ready to sail a new world. He even tried to convince me why the ‘meta-verse’ will win. His theory is that every generation older than his tries to convince his generation that the meta-verse will fail because people prefer and need what is physically present — things you can touch. His argument is that people actually prefer alternatives to what is directly in front of him. I’m afraid he’s right, too. Just look at “Ulysses.” We all want to sail beyond the sunset. Michael Jordan had to retire 3 times from 2 sports. I’m pretty sure Bob Dylan will die on stage. 

With the discoverable world at our fingertips, what will this next generation discover?

I don’t like dwelling on this question for too long. If I do, I may transform into a full blown curmudgeon. But what I do on this blog is attempt to exalt the ordinary because, I’ve found, the ordinary is extraordinary precisely because it doesn’t need the extra to make it so.

Will I have the stamina and interest to sail into the metaverse during my next chapter of life?

Maybe not. 

But I am dusting off my novel at present. I found an editor to work with me through the manuscript. I will continue delving into my own personal depths to broaden my known universe. This includes helping others navigate the unknown metaverse, too.