(gentle piano music) - So thanks for sitting down with me today.

I thought we would start with something we were talking about, I don't know, a week ago and you were telling me about a cross-country trip you took on your reclined bike from Annapolis, St. John's there, all the way cross-country to Santa Fe.

And there was one thing you said, you said on a particular stretch of road, you discovered that you were sentimental and I love that and I wanna ask you about it.

- First of all, it was from Santa Fe to Annapolis.

The direction is, it doesn't really matter, because where this took place was on the banks of the Mississippi River, which is just about halfway.

It had grown out of a whole lot of things.

When I was a teenager, I used to go hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, but due to a foot injury, I couldn't do that any longer and long distance cycling was something that was kind of taking over that part of my life.

So I set out, I got this recumbent tricycle, in fact.

It's a three-wheel vehicle.

It's kinda like a lawn chair on wheels and you lean back and you roll and it's fantastic.

And I wanted to take just a really long trip and I thought from Santa Fe all the way back to Annapolis, linking our two campuses, that'd be perfect.

That's about two thirds of the continent, that's a long way.

It took, ultimately, a little over a month to do it.

And I wanted to have, to experience the country.

And you do experience the country up close.

You smell it in ways that you don't when you're in a car.

Things roll by, but you don't get that really, how you say, nasal experience, (both chuckles) olfactory, that's the 25-cent word I was looking for, experience of it.

So I'm riding along, I'm listening to books on tape, but I got to the Mississippi River and the path I was following cross the Mississippi River at a place called Chester, Illinois.

Somebody who had done bicycle traveling thought this would be a good place to go.

It's not quite as busy as the bridges that take interstate highways across.

Chester turns out to be the hometown of Elzie Segar, the man who created the character Popeye.

So you ride across the bridge and right on the other side of the bridge, there's a little park and there's a statue.

I was about to say a life-sized statue, but how do you know, what's the life-size statue of Popeye standing there.

- Popeye.

- Spent the night in Chester, Illinois and on a Sunday morning, got up early and got on my machine and went rolling down the bluffs.

Early morning fog rolls in into the valley of the Mississippi, so it's a haunting, beautiful place.

I don't start listening to my books right away.

I turn on some music and just by chance, the music I happened to have was a tune called Rosemary's Sister by Connie Dover, sung by Connie Dover, this Anglo-Celtic folk singer and it's a ballad about World War II and this girl, Rosemary and her family are living in London.

The Blitz is on and the story of the ballad is about a bombing raid and her sister gets killed.

And I'm riding along and I'm listening to this in the fog, occasionally a deer wanders across the road.

The deer are looking at me funny, because they've never seen this before.

And I'm listening to this and then suddenly, I realize I'm riding along the banks of the Mississippi River in the heart of America, weeping like a child over this song and that was the first time I realized that I'm a deeply sentimental person.

I had, for almost 50 years at the time, thought of myself as a hard-bitten, noir character with the Humphrey Bogart exterior.

And it turns out, I'd been lying to myself for a half a century of my life.

Self-knowledge is not easy to come by and it's unpleasant when it happens.

But probably valuable.

- I'm sure valuable.

I wanna push a little in a St. John's way about, I mean, your description is so beautiful.

It's funny because on the inside, it might be hard, but from the outside it's a beautiful image.

- It was fun.

- But I wonder if we can think a little bit about what that is, I mean- - Self-knowledge?

- No, not self-knowledge.

The sentimental.

It sounds to me like, that description of the fog and the deer and there's something about being present, too, and the music eliciting that.

I mean, what I really wanna head towards is, I'm wondering whether there's a real narrative that you have woven and what role sentimentality, did it stick with you, but also does it inform the kind of reading that we do?

Do you ever get sentimental with the books that we read?

- Sentimental, I mean, the word sentimental has a negative connotation, doesn't it?

I suppose, does it imply a kind of a loss of control?

Or maybe that's not quite fair.

An irrational plunging into emotionality, something like that, is that what sentimentality is?

I mean, to say that you feel something, "I was moved," is one thing.

To say, "Oh, he's sentimental," that has a kind of a negative connotation.

I think the experience is on this close to each other on the spectrum of human life.

Ever get moved by a reading?

Yes.

(chuckles) Now you're gonna want an example.

I thought you might, darn you.

The Iliad.

Book XXIV of the Iliad, the last book.

When the whole arc of the story of Achilles is over and what's left is the completion of the story of Hector.

When Priam, the father of Hector from the city comes out accompanied by the gods enclosed by the clouds and is led to the tent of Achilles and enters the tent and kneels and grabs the knees of Achilles and begs for the return of the body of his son and says, "And now, I'm doing what no man has done.

I'm kissing the hands of the man who has slain my son."

I can't even think about that without choking up a little bit.

Because it's astonishing, that humanity at that point.

What a flaccid word, that humanity.

Of course, they're human.

Well, actually, it does go without saying with regard to Achilles, does it?

But certainly, with regard to Hector that a father, a son is dead.

It's a cliche, it's been said any number of times that there's nothing that should be, there's nothing worse than that parents should bury their children.

And there it is, in this moment when it's not only that he's burying his child, he has to beg the person who killed him to do it.

How could you not?

Well, I was about to say that's a foolish thing to say.

Of course, it's possible to read it with a sort of a distanced, scholarly detachment.

But it's hard.

- And I think it's interesting, because I feel like the description you gave, and maybe we're, right now, fudging the sentimental versus being moved and I'm okay with that for the moment, but when you were talking about being moved and that description on the Mississippi River, it's powerful and it feels, it's a moment of self-knowledge and there's something profound about it.

And I am interested in our practice of reading books that, I think about the students, that we ask them to read and come to class.

- Oh yes, the students.

- Yes, and the idea that if we're doing it right, our conversation in the classroom, things like what you just described with the Priam-Achilles scene, which is that moving, that's where we're supposed to be landing, in the center of that human issue.

Not being able to look away or deny it.

But I do think our relationship to that kind of actual being moved almost to tears, it's not like we're getting together and we're gonna- - Read it and weep?

- I mean, we might, it happens.

- What a strange way to say it.

- The relationship between, I think, we need to take really seriously that emotional movement, but it's not identical to what we're doing in our conversations.

- Not identical.

No, but, the Iliad.

The Iliad is one of the texts that, for me, there are half a dozen of them or so, I could probably reel off a list of books that have shifted my understanding in the course of my life.

That was actually probably one of the first, 'cause I remember when I first read it.

I'd been a student at St. John's College before I went off in the rest of my career and came back and became a faculty member.

So I was accepted to the college as a senior in high school and there was a period of time I was looking forward to going as an undergraduate and I read the Iliad.

You're supposed to, right?

I read the whole thing ahead of time.

And I remember real clearly that my first reaction was dismissive and scoffing, that Achilles seemed like he's, it's easy to see how this happens, a brat.

He's ungrateful and he's irresponsible and how can he be the hero of this book when he's a jerk?

And once you get that attitude, then nothing else really is, you're not gonna say to yourself, "Well, he's a jerk.

The book is silly.

Oh, but this is a very exciting and powerful moment here."

Things have to change and transform in my understanding of the book.

There's so many different levels at which you could read that book.

A first encounter, you could be that shallow person that I was, reading it that way, getting to the point where you can then feel the human or powerfully emotional connection between Priam and Hector, between Achilles and Patroclus.

There are other ways, too, of course.

I mean, there's the archeological ways, there are the linguistic, poetic ways.

I've been with classes in sophomore language where we talk about the form of the Greek poetry.

I've been in classes, actually, when I was in graduate school, I actually took a class in Greek language and I spent some time with people who were thinking of it from a far more technically linguistic perspective.

There's so many different levels, but, I was about to say it as a doctrinal statement, but I'll try to put it in the form of a question, see whether it makes sense to you.

Unless we can connect at a level that is humanly important to us, it's all very well to focus on the ways in which the Homeric language is an intermediate stage between an hypothetical early Greek that you can find on, well, it's not hypothetical, but we don't have large pieces of poetry that we can find in some inscriptions, and a later Greek in which certain sonic changes haven't happened yet, distinguishing between the Homeric dialect, which is kind of an artificial dialect, it comes out of the Eastern Asia Minor or the Asia Minor coast, Aegean.

It gets transformed as it's repeated over and over again in Athens.

And so you can think about it in terms of, wow, what is the generative singular doing with this un-contracted -oyo sound, rather than the -u?

That's all very technical, that's all very, you can do that and some people can get wrapped up and be very interested in it, I suppose.

But unless you can connect to why anyone would compose this thing and why audiences would sit rapt for hours listening to it, then you really haven't done anything terribly important with it, have you?

- It reminds me where reading or just finished reading Nietzsche in my senior seminar, and I'm bringing it up because I think it complicates it in an interesting way, I agree with you.

If it doesn't connect in some real way, why are we doing it?

The worry with Nietzsche, I think, and this might have to do with the difference between sentimentality or some kind of movement of heart or soul that we, I was gonna say look down on, but think is is problematic in some way versus clearly we take seriously a certain kind of movement, that the worry with Nietzsche is, that people can get moved quickly, that the sort of fiery character of his language and the spirited-ness of his arguments and radical unconventionality moves people.

And I think as a tutor, my responsibility, I do find that writing really powerful, but is to take a second and to pull us back to the text and somehow to the level of, I don't even know, reason?

Trying to dig into what he's doing to get to a deeper level, so that maybe we come out the other side moved, having it mean something real for our lives, but there's a danger there of flurry of poetic movement that I think can capture people too quickly and invite a flouting of convention and some notion of beyond good and evil, which is insufficient.

It's exciting.

Again, we're getting to this thing- of- - It's interesting, you used the term unconventional and flouting the convention and that's a strange thing.

The thought I have when you say that is, there's a way in which Homer is totally conventional, if you're in those conventions.

We may be in a different world of conventions now than what he was in, that his poetry is.

I'm thinking of the ways in which it was composed and the theories that you run into with, Lord, is it Alfred or Albert, who explores the way in which, not just the meter of the verse.

Meter, of course, helps people memorize long pieces of poetry.

Me, I can't memorize anything, it's my failing.

But it's not just the metrical form.

It's chunks of semantic structure that get dropped in.

He focuses on why is Achilles always swift-footed when he's in the accusative and never when he's in the generative?

Well, because that's the way you construct those words.

The poet had an arsenal of things that he could say and he said it and the people expected to hear.

Now, he's, to say that is maybe no more than to say that any artist has a palette of colors and they expect to see colors and you can do things with the colors and the Homeric poems do that.

I say Homeric poems a little advisedly, 'cause it's conceivable that what we have is not composed by any individual, but by an aggregation of poetic tradition.

But you used the word unconventional.

That fiery, that flamboyant personal struggle.

Even by the time you get to Virgil in the First Century, BCE, as he's composing the Ennead, he's looking back, I think he must be looking back and I feel like his poem is looking back at those things and feeling that radical difference that Achilles is a character who can do things that Virgil's characters can't do.

That they're more constrained.

Achilles lives in a world in which, sure, there were social conventions, but what they had there on the shores outside of Troy, outside the Hellas or an aggregation of kings, they weren't sad traps underneath a single monarch.

Their society hadn't become nearly as rigid, nearly as structured as what Virgil was living in.

He could hear in Homer ways that these people could be that seem unconventional to him, like they seem unconventional to us.

And as a result, you get, among other things, in the character of Aeneas, a hero who is, well, he's not, but Virgil certainly is constantly aware of the shadow of Achilles and the way in which the world in which his hero, Aeneas, lives and moves is not that.

He's subordinate, he's obedient, he's, the Latin word is pious.

Piety is not something that Achilles has going for him at all.

The Ennead is another of the books that's changed in my estimation of it, my first encounter.

I'm being far more revealing of how stupid and shallow I am or have been, maybe both.

But on my first encounter with it as a sophomore, I didn't understand that book at all.

By that time, I had accepted the Iliad and the seminars in my freshman year had led me to find that my first reading as a senior thinking of going St. John's, that was swept away.

And I'd come to really kind of appreciate, I think at some level, maybe not the best level, the deepest level, but the books keep getting better and better.

But certainly better than I had been.

- So it seems to me that what you're reflecting on in your sort of changed relationships and increase, especially going from, and I don't think it's atypical, having a kind of reaction first time through and then changing it.

- Changing it.

- But the practice of reading, I mean, it really speaks to that.

For some reason, in the context of this conversation, I think, clearly, we learn more.

The more you read, the more detail you see, the complexity of character, of argument becomes clearer to you, your relationship to the questions you have about the text change.

But I think that it happens at the level of emotion as well is really interesting and this is going back to my Nietzsche point, because it's the opposite of maybe a fiery first reaction.

It feels a lot, you feel something, but maybe you need to actually, that there are layers of that kind of emotion as well.

It's not just that you get to be a deeper thinker, you sort of get to be a deeper feeler.

So this idea that what's worth reading is something that moves us, that's what we were saying.

That if it doesn't actually speak to your humanity- - And as you live with it, the manner in which it moves, you can differ, grow and develop.

- Can change.

- Which is interesting.

Someone might think, (chuckles) a lot of people think.

It turns out whenever I use the phrase a lot of people, what I really mean is me, if I'm not being very thoughtful.

A lot of people think that feeling is just a given.

There's a tradition of that actually.

- And I think that the students, too, it's interesting because I think the students agree with us that you want to feel moved and the idea that you have to earn that is maybe less intuitive to us and what it looks like.

And here I wanna shift it a little, because I know that you do a lot of work in the math and laboratory programs.

- Very feeling place.

- Well, that's what I wanna ask, is in theory, to me, it shouldn't be totally different.

If we're gonna talk about deep movement, not necessarily the first blush, of course.

I think about The Brothers Karamazov that I cry at that book in the rebellion scene when all of these terrible descriptions of what happens to the children, I can't help it, but my- - The Turks with the- - Let's not talk about it.

But my relationship to that crying has changed.

So now I question it, I wonder why is this a book that makes me cry like this?

But in any case, one would think that you could be moved by a scientific text, by a mathematical text and I feel like you're in a particular interesting position for me to ask you that because you know those texts well.

- So I'm encountering, reading the works of Scott Buchanan, the first dean of the College under the new program back from 1937 to 1947.

He is the author of, among other things, a book entitled, Poetry and Mathematics and another book that I've been reading, Truth in Science.

One of his central ideas is that a scientific text, a great scientific text is a work of poetry by which he means, I think, not that the right-hand margin doesn't justify and that there are rhyming words and stuff.

What he means is a work of world creation, a work in which the former idea of what the world was gets radically upset and reformed.

(gentle piano music) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (rhythmic chiming)