Dwayne Betts on the Iliad

Dwayne Betts: It is such a pleasure. Although I got to say that I recognize how unreachable Mike Munger’s record now is for me.

Dwayne Betts: Although, hey, Harper [Bryce Harper, Philadelphia Phillies–Econlib Ed.], just hit for the cycle. So, maybe I could hit for the cycle. We need a version of the cycle for EconTalk.

Dwayne Betts: And, I have a New York Times article out that’s worth talking about, too. But, right now, we get to talk about The Iliad.

Dwayne Betts: I should say that I just wanted to experience reading a book that I was deeply familiar with, with somebody else. And, I wanted to experience doing it. When you said you hadn’t read it, it felt like I was compelled to ask to read it with you, because I also hadn’t read it.

But, it was a bad decision from the start, Russ.

Dwayne Betts: Because this is–I think we started talking at the beginning of June?

Dwayne Betts: I had a documentary premiere at Tribeca on June 8th. And then, I had my first solo art exhibit on June 19th. I didn’t start reading this actively until June 20th. Over the past three days–

Dwayne Betts: I was on Chapter–I was on Book Two. I was on Book Nine when you asked me what my favorite passages were. But that’s what it felt like, and this is actually why I’m so glad it happened this way. These days, we’ve all experienced what it means to binge-watch a television show and get so immersed in it that it becomes a part of our daily lives.

Dwayne Betts: But, actually, that used to be a familiar feeling that we got when we read back in the days when we were younger and we could really get deeply immersed.

Now, it’s so difficult to do because even if you read a big book over six weeks, six months, something about the book, it disperses itself. It just sort of floats in your psyche. But, I was deeply engaged for hours and hours every day. I walked 28,000 steps yesterday. Every one of those steps, I had The Iliad in my hand, I had the Kindle in my hand. I was weaving traffic. I felt like it was moments–

And, actually, it became embedded in my personal life. A friend of mine, may he rest in peace, this guy Melvin Davis, who was brilliant and who was a veteran, he died over the weekend. And, it was one of those things where it eased his suffering, and his family knew, and I knew. And, I just had this kind of relationship with him that was rooted in storytelling. And so, even me reading The Iliad was also me thinking about him.

One of the last conversations that we had was about a musket. Which again, a musket as a tool of war; but also bringing in the conversation about a musket when he was at his sick bed was kind of similar to the way in which you could sing these stories of the way in which our lives sometimes feel like this struggle for glory. You could sing that story and sing it in peace when somebody is on their way to another version of their journey.

So, it was just beautiful, actually. I feel like I’m still giddy in a kind of fever dream that has changed the way I think about how you could understand life with a story that feels this old and that’s refreshingly new. Yeah, I really actually appreciated the opportunity.

Dwayne Betts: It surprised me that I wept at the end.

Dwayne Betts: And I did know what was going to happen.

Dwayne Betts: That really surprised me. And then, there was another point. It was a quote that I had read years ago about the Vietnam. It said something to the effect that: ‘It was a world in which there seemed to be a lot of choices, but there were actually no choices.’ And, I felt like it was a passage in there that I found deeply moving about the whole book felt like that.

Like, Homer does a wildly emitive[?] job of creating this cast of characters who seem to have so many choices and yet still have none. And that tension is what drives you along. And it’s so well done that even though I knew what would happen next, I still read it as if there was a choice about what would happen next–

Dwayne Betts: And, it was something that was beautiful about the juxtaposition that was constantly happening. It was like The Things They Carried, actually. It was like the whole book was an animation of The Things They Carried because–

Dwayne Betts: It’s by Tim O’Brien.

Dwayne Betts: Because here, you never got introduced to characters as if all they were were soldiers. They had this life that extended outside of Troy that was always evoked with a kind of regret or a kind of honor, but it always had a kind of sorrow to it. Because you knew that these were essentially a string of elegies, a string of obituaries that you were hearing constantly throughout the book.

But that I was surprised at how taken aback I was by the ability for this seemingly kind of war story to explicate so many complicated ideas I have about friendship, about love, about trust, about anger. And also, about the ways in which you could be–I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation like this, but you felt like it was a foregone conclusion what you would do.

I remember when I went to prison. I went to prison when I was 16 years old. I absolutely felt like–you know, after I committed the crime, I literally felt like it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to prison. As if–I’ve often told myself this metaphor–that I drove myself.

And, surviving prison was not a foregone conclusion. But I felt like I got lost in a world where I had no choices, but somehow still ended up discovering choices.

And that’s kind of what The Iliad is for me. It’s this world in which the characters seemingly have no choices, but still consistently animate what it means to make choices under the most dire constraints. In some sense, the best of my time in prison was trying to emulate that process, where you find a way to make a choice even when it’s a foregone conclusion.

Like, even when you would rail against the gods: There’s one scene where Achilles says, ‘Don’t predict my death. I know I’m going to die,’ but I kind of still get to make this choice about what happens for the next few hours. It was lovely.

Dwayne Betts: And, it’s also interesting, the way that the characters get introduced. I was talking to a friend of mine last night, and she was reading the Letters of Virginia Woolf. And, she said that in the letters it always says, ‘I thank you for the letter you sent to me recounting the summer that you spent in France and how you were working on that new short story. It was such a beautiful story.’ And then, it’ll go into what Virginia Woolf wants to say.

And, I thought about how beautiful that is because oftentimes–and she said it was a form, it was a structure, it was a constraint, and it was a way to say, ‘I heard you.’

Dwayne Betts: I actually think that Homer does that constantly–

Dwayne Betts: And, sometimes he says: Agamemnon says, ‘Odysseus, I need to send you to Achilles and I want to to say exactly what I said. Say this.’ And then, later, when Odysseus is in front of Achilles, he says the exact same thing–like, word for word, the exact same speech. And, there’s something that’s beautiful about that because it’s these echoes that get created in the text that’s almost like the–so even though it’s a lot of characters, there’s so many of these echoes that each time you’ve been taught how to read it, you begin to understand that these soldiers, their names aren’t there to make you know them. Their names are there to make you understand that this war has huge ramifications on more than just the seven or eight central figures and the gods. It has huge ramifications–it even evokes their mothers and their fathers–

Dwayne Betts: and their kinfolk. And so, that becomes, for me, a structural element that allowed me to truly, like, dance with the book. And I, literally, I read every word. I thought that I would get lost in skimming because I also knew the story, but I found that I just wanted to read it.

Dwayne Betts: I have friends of mine, man, who they didn’t–my father actually didn’t get a chance to live the life that I lived; and I thought about how, when I went to prison, I changed my name and everybody called me Shahid. And then, when I came home, my mom, and my friends, and my people called me Dwayne again, and now I have a world where some people call me Dwayne, some people call me Shahid.

But then I went to college and people called me Reginald. And, I had to ask myself, ‘Why do I publish under Reginald Dwayne Betts? Why do I let people call me so many different names?’ And, I realized that it’s something about me trying to honor how I’ve had to walk through this world in different ways. But, also, when I say Reginald Dwayne Betts, it is my father’s name. And I feel like what I get to do is, even in invoking his name, I get to give some honor to the possibility of his life.

And so, much of The Iliad is literally nestled in people’s lives being cut short. In a cruel–it’s almost like this person was great at home. If only they hadn’t chosen to come to Troy where they’ll be cut down, where they can’t outrun death. There’s so many instances where the book just reminds you that invoking a name isn’t about saying, ‘Remember who this individual person is,’ but to recognize this world of war.

It’s almost like the Amichai poem, “The Diameter of a Bomb”: The literal text illuminates a world in which the suffering–the circle includes everybody, and there’s nobody that’s left out. That’s constantly an element of, I think, the story that I get from the Fagles translation, which I also read.

Dwayne Betts: The Yehuda Amichai–I know I’m pronouncing his name wrong. I know it. But, the poem “The Diameter of The Bomb.”

Dwayne Betts: Oh, seriously?

Dwayne Betts: Oh, I have to read you this poem. This is wild. I don’t believe you’ve never heard–I read this poem in prison, and it’s become one of the things that has been a touchstone of how I think about the world and how I think about suffering.

The Diameter of the Bomb
[by Jehuda Amichai]

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

Dwayne Betts: I wondered this. It makes me want to know the original and be able to read it–

Dwayne Betts: Because the translation is so fresh that I just wondered how it sounded in the original. There was one line, it was talking about the Argives wouldn’t relent to the Trojans, but the Trojans were pounding them and pounding them and pushing them back towards their ships. And, it says, ‘But, the Argives, they held tight as a working widow holds the scales.’

So, I think Homer does it in two ways. One is invoking a soldier and a soldier’s life outside of war. And, the other is you had these similes and these metaphors that yoke the world of war to the world of work. They yoke the world of war to the world of not war in this elegant way that makes you–people often say things like, ‘Well, you wouldn’t relate to this story because you’re not a soldier,’ or ‘because you don’t like war.’ But, I think it’s actually a really skillful, precise thing is that the story does that reminds you that this is not just about war. That it is about family, that it is about friendship, that it is about the unmistakable burden of sorrow and cruelty.

Dwayne Betts: And literally, one of the things about the brutality of it is how descriptive the brutality is.

Dwayne Betts: And, the brutality, it exists as exactly what it is, but it’s often accompanied, juxtaposed with the cost of it. Nobody’s oblivious, even as they chase fame, even if they chase good fortune.

There’s this one passage where it’s one guy, Hippotus: he’s out for fame. And it says that: ‘He’s here because he’s out for fame.’ But, then, this is the passage that narrates his death. How can you start a passage this way? Right? There’s so much often where he tells you in advance what’s going to happen and then you still delight in the telling. It says [from Book XVII]:

No Trojans could save him now, strain as they might
Ajax son of Telamon charging quickly into the carnage
speared him at close range through the bronze-cheeked helmet,
the horsehair crest cracked wide open around the point,
smashed by the massive spear and hand that drove it.
His brains burst from the wound in sprays of blood,
soaking the weapon’s socket–
his strength dissolved on the spot, his grip loosed
and he dropped the foot of brave Patroclus’ corpse.
There on the ground it lay–he rushed to join it,
pitching over the dead man’s body face-to-face,
a world away from Larissa’s dark rich soil…
Never would he repay his loving parents now
for the gift of rearing–his life cut short so soon,
brought down by the spear of lionhearted Ajax.

You have a passage where actually, nobody is necessarily a villain and everybody is left mourning. But, it’s just beautiful to me the way that you get reminded that your actions of today don’t just touch you. It touches the family that you left. You went to war to bring honor to your family when really, you went to war to–and it always reminds you that that war chasing riches.

Dwayne Betts: They murder somebody and they immediately take in the armor. And, it also reminds you of one subtle thing, too. One, that war chasing riches. And, two, a lot of them don’t have money. So, they’re not just taking the armor and stuff, and the clothes: they actually using the armor and the weapons for the next fight. Even Hector, the great warrior that he is, puts on Achilles’ armor. He doesn’t just, like, take it as a trophy. He also takes it as something that will protect him. And so, often, people die because their armor is not as good as others’.

Dwayne Betts: It cracks in some place, it shatters–

Dwayne Betts: Right. Oh, you’re sending people–it’s almost like some of the soldiers you recognize have no hope to survive the end of the chapter, let alone the end of the book–

Dwayne Betts: And somehow, they still have to have that humanity. It’s wild. I think it’s also just a lesson that, in this world, everybody can matter. I think it’s a certain kind of democracy in the violence that happens in the book and a certain kind of democracy in the capriciousness of the gods.

Even amongst the gods. I thought it was also compelling–I’m realizing, that Zeus could be swayed. He could be swayed by something other than–it was a moment when Zeus was going to save Sarpedon, he was going to save his son. And Hera–usually you see people praying, you see people extorting the gods, you see people bemoaning and wailing what has been done. But, this was one where it was just pure reason. It was logic. It was, like, ‘Are you seriously considering rescuing your son? All of the gods have lost sons and daughters to this war and to the violence of the humans. Is death not just a natural consequence of life?’ It was a weird moment where I would have never thought that he would be open to being convinced.

Dwayne Betts: And so, it’s also, like, the book, it’s a contradiction the way life is. You could be all-powerful and still be swayed by reason. You could be capricious and cruel, and still have a soft spot and rescue somebody because you say that they are ordained not to die in Troy.

Dwayne Betts: At first, I thought he was going to go to war. See, this is the thing. I thought that he was going–that, one, Homer is actually better than the movie. And, people often say the book is better than the movie.

Dwayne Betts: But, I think that The Iliad as a book, Hector has way more dimension.

Dwayne Betts: When he kills Patroclus and he takes the armor, he is cruel. He is as insulting and biting as anybody else. He’s really cruel to Paris. It’s almost as if it’s a line on–

Dwayne Betts: His half-brother, who Helen of Troy–and this is how the whole war starts. But, he is not oblivious to the absurdity of the situation they’re in, and that is the fault of his brother. He does not pretend like that’s not the case.

And, I thought that was just one of the really compelling things that made the book so engaging, is that people had real dimension and bite. They were cruel at times, and the cruelty backfired on them, but they had that dimension. They made mistakes.

Dwayne Betts: This is one of favorite–

Dwayne Betts: This is one of my favorite parts. This is Book 18. It was one of my favorite parts because–I thought also it was–so it’s this part at the beginning where Achilles is playing a lyre, and they come in and they get him to go to war. And, it said something to the effect that, ‘He rose from his peace.’ And, what I thought was beautiful was that he rose from his peace, this idea that he both rose to break his peace–so it was a physical action that broke his peace. But, also, this idea of what is peace. And, you had this great warrior who knew how to play the lyre, but was singing about war. So, then it became this thing that you could have peace in the recounting of stories of war.

And, I felt like it was the argument that we live in all of the time: we talk about video games, we talk about violent movies. It was saying that Achilles could be in peace as he sings of war. So, I could be in peace: The Iliad could be about something else besides teaching me how to be angry and how to be violent. Which is one of the arguments that we make about great literature all the time. And so I thought that that was a beautiful rendition of it, because his peace was only broken when they actually asked him to physically engage in war, and that was the thing that broke his peace.

But later on, it was this idea in Chapter 18 when he was getting his shield, I thought it was another reminder, though. That again, you don’t go to war without the rest of the world. When you’re carrying this armor into battle that is supposed to protect you, the actual thing that’s protecting you, if you’re ever protected at all, is this real hope of the best of humanity, which is the realization that you could have all of it juxtaposed.

Patroclus might be one of the most honored characters in the book. He was one of the most noble characters in the book. He was pleading with Achilles to fight and, by my recollection, it never felt–nobody was really was ever fighting for just money. They sometimes were offended by the, ‘I don’t need the money right now.’ Achilles was, like, ‘I don’t need the money. Let’s go fight now. I’m in it, I’m in it.’

But, like, Patroclus was this honorable dude who really–he stops–when he’s on his way to tell Achilles of how bad it’s going, he meets a friend that’s in a bad way. And, the friend is, like, ‘I’m good, just leave me.’ He’s, like, ‘I can’t leave you like this.’ And, he’s a medicine man as well and tries to help this guy, and then has to eventually leave because the war is going so bad that he says, ‘I hate to leave you, but I have to leave you to go to Achilles to try to get help.’

But, my point is that I learned that Patroclus killed somebody in a dice game. And so, this idea that you don’t have to be the sum total of a thing that you did in the past, I think, connects to this idea that Achilles redeemed himself. And, part of, for me, what Achilles redeemed himself is how do you apologize for your foolishness? How do you apologize for your anger? And, how you do it–him and Agamemnon did it–but how do you do it in a way that acknowledges the power of the gods, but really, really says, ‘What kind of fool am I?’ And, I actually think that he did it better than Agamemnon in some ways because he was the character who had to reflect on profound loss, and I think the way that he dealt with Priam at the end.

Dwayne Betts: And, he dealt with it–he didn’t deal with it out of ignorance. He knew that a god had[?] brought him. But, he also–everybody believed that he would disobey the gods, so it wasn’t as if–it’s this point about free will existing in a world in which we know that the gods are acting with reckless, wild abandon on the destruction of the lives of humans. I thought it was beautiful for that reason, the paired relationship between the two of them and what both of it says about being able to transform your life.

Dwayne Betts: But, you know–oh, go ahead.

Dwayne Betts: Yeah. Yes and no, though, because also something that’s really clever that happens as a poet is thinking about the artistry [inaudible 00:38:57]. So, Odysseus does memorize that part word-for-word, right?

Dwayne Betts: And then, you say, ‘Well, and Agamemnon told him to do it.’ So, then he goes to Achilles and tells Achilles; and Achilles is, like, ‘Okay. Well, I need you to tell him exactly what I say word-for-word.’ When Odysseus goes back to Agamemnon–

Dwayne Betts: he does not. He’s, like, ‘I am not repeating any of those things.’ He went back and said, ‘You know,–‘

Dwayne Betts: ‘Achilles is still in his anger. He’s still in his anger. I don’t think he’s going to be at the party.’

Dwayne Betts: So, I think it’s both. But also think it’s this way in–and I think it was about Odysseus’ belief that the two of them would do the right thing at some point. And, he was, like, ‘I will tell you exactly what Agamemnon says.’ He didn’t say the part about he has to bend his knees to Agamemnon, though.

Dwayne Betts: No, he said everything except that one line.

Dwayne Betts: ‘I’m going to leave this little part out, I won’t say that.’

So, I also thought that–I don’t know, I’ve often heard people talk about Don Quixote as being the birth of the novel. It’s something about The Iliad being such an old story that’s refreshing and surprising because you see how embedded within it is so much of the ways in which we still tell stories now.

Dwayne Betts: And, I do think that all of the mnemonic devices–but we use those even when we do them with just phrases and things like that. I think that we’re always telling ourselves how to remember the story of our lives.

And, for real, this for me is a beautiful model because the hardest thing I think for us to do is when we, in our moments of suffering, or sorrow, or struggle, to remember that our lives are still yoked to the lives of a whole lot of others. And, I think that’s one of the things that I walked away from reading the book, being immersed in it for three days, is how interconnected all of these lives were. Even the lives of the gods, they couldn’t exist, really, without these humans who they kept entangling themselves with.

Dwayne Betts: And, you know, and the wild thing about that is that the characters do get differentially aided in those ways. Like, Achilles has a kind of self-awareness, Menelaus has a kind of self-awareness, Diomedes has a kind of self-awareness that some of the characters actually lack. And, you can see that he believed that he could bribe Achilles on the battlefield. There’s several people who think that they’re going to bribe their way to surviving, and it’s, like: Why would you believe that this is going to happen?

Yeah, I think that that was one. But, also, that set up the turn that happens in the end, because you could just see Achilles as heartless, as brutal, as fully, fully committed to rage, and then you see him soften. And I think that scene right there is the setup for returning Hector’s body, because that what makes it feel wildly more authentic. I actually thought he was going to let him go. Priam’s son Lycaon, what he was saying sounded compelling to me. I thought, ‘Oh, you did save him once.’ So, I thought Achilles was going to be, like, ‘You know what, I’m going to send you back to your dad since your half-brothers ain’t coming.’ He was, like, ‘Nah, this is not going to work. You’re not going to patronize me. I know you didn’t bring up my friend’s name to save your life. This will not work.’

Dwayne Betts: And, it’s another passage early on where you wonder if it’s self-serving of Achilles when he says it, but he goes into this whole riff about why they can’t convince him to fight. And he said, ‘We’re all here to serve in a fight and to die.’ He actually explains it. He says, ‘If we’re not going to follow the rules, if we’re not going to have honor, then I’m not going to be involved in it anymore.’

So, I actually, because I know that Achilles dies in the end, one of the reasons why I was compelled by him from the first page is that I really do think that he was forcing himself to stand on principle, independent of the carnage his standing on principle was going to create.

Dwayne Betts: And, I think that he knew he wasn’t going to make it home from the very beginning.

I think that one difference in Troy, the movie with Brad Pitt, and reading this that I found profoundly unsettling was that Achilles put the armor on Patroclus.

Dwayne Betts: Because in the movie, Patroclus sneaks out. And, what you find is that Achilles, the overwhelming grief he feels, it’s also part and parcel because it was his decision to make.

Dwayne Betts: And, I feel like that was also a part of, for me, the arc of his character. He was trying to be principled. He was trying to say, ‘I told you that I wasn’t going to fight, but this is what I could do.’ And, it worked; and he was being a strategist and he was trying to abide by his principles. And you could see, Agamemnon, at the end, he was, like, ‘Everything is over now and Patroclus is dead. I realize that I wasn’t valuing the thing that I should have valued the most.’ Which, incidentally, is the thing that they all end up going back to before they die: it’s the families that they left behind. Everybody is evoking the family and the life that was independent of the spoils of war. And so, it was also this interesting narrative of what matters most.

On the front end, they talk about the spoils and the riches. But, when your head is smashed in, when you’re mourning your good friend–and everybody has good friends. It’s not isolated to the Argives; it’s not isolated to the Trojans. The Achaeans have great friendships, too. And so, you see that at the end, the thing that’s most lost is the joy that comes from having a great friendship. That is the thing that’s most profound about Achilles’ loss: it’s not even the woman that he claimed in war. Which also kind of puts the lie to his anger around it.

Even Helen is constantly saying, ‘I wish I would have died those 20 years ago. I wish I hadn’t come here.’ It’s the kind of frivolousness of the frailty of human decisions that create all of the disorder that exists in the book and the inescapability of the frailty of human decision-making. That’s also one of the lessons of the book, I think, is that humans are fallible and you have to keep going. I feel like that’s one of the lessons of the whole book, is you have to keep trying to figure it out.

Dwayne Betts: That’s why they had cameras–

Dwayne Betts: No, no, no, no. Achilles has killed multiple–

Dwayne Betts: Achilles has killed multiple of this man’s sons.

Dwayne Betts: He’s killed at least six of his sons, yo.

Dwayne Betts: I want to say two things. One, remember that Hermes posed as Achilles’ right-hand man when he went to Priam.

Dwayne Betts: Which also says something different about honor. It also says something different about what does it mean to expect kindness and generosity, even from a stranger. Even to such a degree that the stranger is connected–like, Achilles might grant you mercy, but why would you believe that his right-hand man would do the same thing? He might kill you on the spot. He might believe that–

Dwayne Betts: you have something nefarious plan. So, that was one point.

But, what I thought, because I read this, it’s Father’s Day weekend.

Dwayne Betts: And, in a real way, you have so many–the life expectancy rate of Black men in America is tragically low anyway. And, I’m dealing with thinking about a friend of mine who passed younger than he might have. But also I’ve been obsessed with early death since I was young because I went to prison as a kid. But, this book is really the lives of a lot of older men who lived to be seniors and a lot of young men who didn’t make it. And, these men are all engaged in the death–in the death sport. So, it’s this constant awareness.

And, what I thought was compelling about the end is that when Priam was trying to convince Achilles to let his son go, he said [Book 24, lines 570+],

“Remember your own father, great godlike Achilles–
as old as I am, past the threshold of deadly old age!
No doubt the countrymen round about him plague him now,
with no one there to defend him, beat away disaster.
No one–but at least he hears you’re still alive
and his old heart rejoices, hopes rising, day by day,
to see his beloved son come sailing home from Troy….”

And, what I found beautiful about Priam is that he was able to go to Achilles and not lose his dignity by invoking, I think, the idea of fatherhood and the idea that Achilles knew that he wasn’t going to leave Troy.

But also, Achilles, like, Patroclus was like his brother, his son, you know what I mean? He was his best friend. And so, it was this notion that I think he remarked on, this twin loss that Achilles was feeling. He wouldn’t be able to raise his sons and have the life that Priam had. But, also, given that Priam had it, why would you deny the man to have something that you know your father was about to be denied, because you knew you were doomed not to leave the shores of Troy? Or you hope you would leave and be buried with Patroclus?

So, that’s what I found really moving. I found that what does the duties of

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices? [–Robert Hayden]

Which is the last two lines of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” But, I think that that moment for Priam captures that: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” Like, how do you know what the duty of love is?

And, Priam could not have expected–he says it: ‘Look at me, I have wept on the feet of the man who murdered my son, I’ve kissed the hands of the man who murdered my son.’ I just he put us in a whole different state of what fathers do for their sons, even to the point of they’re already gone, but you still have to be a father. I think that might be why I found it particularly beautiful, to read it at this particular time of year.

Dwayne Betts: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

Dwayne Betts: Though, The Iliad reminds you that sometimes you don’t get repaid. That’s the tragedy of it. And, I actually think that the son writing about the father is also thinking about the fact that you don’t get paid, because sometimes the very people who should see your generosity in your love and what you’ve done. Priam is constantly concerned with that about all of his sons, including Paris. His sons have literally brought ruin to the family–all but Hector. Which is also one of the deeply profound reasons why he’s distraught, because he is, in some way, an honest man, constantly telling his sons how they are just, like, not good human beings, and that’s why he’s so disappointed in them and devastated with Hector’s death.

But, I also just think that–we say you can’t know, except literature gives you some kind of sense of it. Reading that end, it gave me a sense of the lonely office of fatherhood when–I have a friend whose father, a friend of mine, he got arrested and he got sentenced to some time in prison. And, he had an option to get out early. And he was going to the hearing, and his father came and testified in front of the judge. And, he talks about–my friend wrote an essay about it, Randall Horton. And, he talks about his father weeping and getting emotional, but essentially pleading for his life. And, it’s literally, ‘Oh, I never thought of it this way.’ But, it is a modern rendition of what Priam did. It’s like: ‘My son is not innocent.’ This is not why I’m here. This is not the conversation that we’re having. We’re having a conversation about what a man deserves that is independent of the marker of guilt. What mercy does a man deserve?

And, I think that’s why I found myself deeply moved by it, because you can learn from hearing the story. I think, in some ways, the whole point of the story, even when a story tells you, ‘You cannot know unless you’ve been here,’ the story’s actually trying to give you a clue. No, actually, you do know because now you have been here. For three days, I was on a battlefield in Troy, wondering who would survive. And, strangely, even though I know the story, it was still able to surprise me again and again because Homer got to choose when the story would end. And so, when you read all of those other iterations, you’d forget that you haven’t read this one, which is making all kinds of decisions that changes the texture of your emotional response to the book. I didn’t know it was such a book about fathers and sons and how fraught it is to try to become a man in a world within the shadow of your history.

Dwayne Betts: Yeah, yeah. I thought that was in Homer.

Dwayne Betts: This is literally the only one. I forgot that. He has all these children, but this is the only one–the whole Troy rejoices when they get the body back. And in fact, is an 11-day celebration, and it preordained the day the war was going to commence on. It’s wild to think that these two warring parties know each other and know each other’s rights so well and are willing to honor them, even in the face of death. Because Achilles, not only does he say, ‘I’m going to give you your son,’ but, ‘I also am going to use my power and my influence to let you live another 11 days.’ And, it’s also just interesting that, in the book, knowing that Achilles can make that commitment, and we believe that Agamemnon is going to hold onto it.

Dwayne Betts: You know, I wrote a book; I wrote this huge–in Bastards of the Reagan Era, I had this 100-line poem that I wrote in iambic pentameter. And, I used a lot of lines like the ‘wine dark asphalt’; and I was trying to use these riffs that I got from Homer or from what I imagined to be Homer. But, I also threaded lines from Shakespeare into the poem. I threaded lines from Public Enemy[?-ies?] into the poem. And, what I found fascinating is that when the poem got reviewed–it was this 100-line poem about this kid that goes to prison, so an epic about some young kid that goes to prison. But, it intentionally wasn’t me; the kid was in prison for murder.

But, what I found fascinating is somebody, a reviewer, said, ‘And, these gritty street-soaked lines.’ And, what I found fascinating is people didn’t hear the Homer in it, because sometimes you choose to hear what’s there.

And also, I think it says something about the flexibility of language in this book, and the Fagles translation, and the other translations, and the way in which, in some sense, the best ways to describe moments in life–the best ways from 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago–still work today. Which, for me, is something that’s revelatory about the possibility that you could find in words.

That idea about ‘hold your horses,’ from the funeral chapter–I was like, ‘Wait. Is this where the line ‘hold your horses’ came from?’ Because it was such a perfect phrase. And I know what it means colloquially, right? I had never heard it as metaphor operating in the real world: literally, the older man is telling the younger man, ‘Hold your horses. You are about to get us injured here.’ So many moments like that.

Dwayne Betts: He says, ‘Sleep with the fishes!’

Dwayne Betts: That’s right.

Dwayne Betts: Yeah, it was so–I was like, ‘What?’

Yeah, this is why I honestly think it’s part adventure story, part war story, part deep psychological analysis of the human psyche. But, also a lesson on the circular telling of a story: how to keep going back to what the center is, but doing it in different ways. So, by the time you get to the end, you recognize that you haven’t read a war story at all. You read a story about all of the ways in which the human condition frustrates our ability to know each other, and still, somehow, we do know each other.

Dwayne Betts: Yeah, but I also believe that the book tells you why. Because you get to see that to mourn–I also feel like sometimes we live in a world–not to compare myself to Achilles, but when I got profoundly depressed, I literally remember writing you on my way to Italy, telling you that I am weeping every day and I am struggling and incapable of understanding. And, I think if you take it out of the situation that is happening in the book and you say, ‘What can happen to a man where, like, everything in his life fractured and he’s left in what feels like an inconsumable grief or an unrelenting grief?’ Right? I feel like I was there.

And I sensed that in Achilles, when you had somebody who never cried and now was constantly weeping. It reminded me of the world that I was in. And he knew he had a source to his weeping, but you couldn’t just grieve alone. You had to have access to bandwidth of human emotions, but also to the history of a human being. I think there’s a way in which death ties you to the moment of death; but that’s not what’s going to make you whole.

And so, you see that: First, Achilles, they needed the body back. But the body was the start of the conversation where you become whole, and you become whole as a part of a ritual that begins with the body. And then, you had all of the games; but games weren’t just games. The games were opportunities for old men to remember when they were young. And, the games were opportunities for young men to imagine being old again.

It’s a moment in which they race, and Ajax–little Ajax–is superfast. And one of the gods trips him up as he’s about to win the race, right?

Dwayne Betts: And, it says that he falls across the finish line, comes in second–with, like, waste and stuff all in his face. And, the older man, I think it was Odysseus, wins. But, another kid says: ‘You know Odysseus can’t beat nobody in no race: he’s, like, three times as old as him.’ And so then you realize the race is not even about the great gifts. The race is about these generations communing with each other in play in the face of the fact that some of their lives are going to get cut profoundly short.

So, I think the attachment is more so about how do you start a grieving process that includes the full capaciousness of a person’s life? Because otherwise, you can’t get out of the cycle of just relentless weeping. Priam says to Achilles, ‘I haven’t slept for 12 days.’ It’s a physicality to the mourning that happens when you find out about the body first becoming just a garment. And then, how do you make that body more than a garment again on the back end? I think it is through the 11-day ritual of prayer; it is through the 11-day ritual of honoring; it is through the 11-day ritual of remembering.

And, I say all of this as somebody who recognizes that the horror of exile is it doesn’t just cut you, make you incapable of experiencing those things in your actual life, but sometimes the exile strips you of the experiences that allow you to have that structure in the back of your head. Some of those men, their lives got cut so short that they might have never participated in this thing as an adult, so they didn’t even fully understand the rites that were going to happen to usher them home. And, I think that’s also part of the tragedy that comes with this idea of the body being the container for so much of the memories that people walk around with.

He even kept the bones, and they was really meticulous about it. They burned all of these other bones, and they was, like, ‘Hey, be careful, just get Patroclus’ bones. His are in the middle, yeah, beside that heavy urn. Those are his bones. Don’t get no other bones because we’re taking his bones back.’ And Patroclus asks Achilles, his last request was that he bury his bones with Achilles, that Achilles’ bones be buried with Patroclus’ bones. It’s a strangely, profoundly intimate portrayal of friendship. And, I don’t say strange as in weird: I say strange as in it’s not a familiar thing that we notice, even in the writings today of the intimate relationships among men.

Dwayne Betts: Thank you. We talk about this all the time, Great Books, and even my organization, Freedom Reads, we talk about what it means to read a book with somebody.

Dwayne Betts: So, Freedom Reads is an organization I began when somebody asked me, ‘What would you do for people in prison if money wasn’t an issue?’ I said, ‘I would put a million books in prison because we put millions of people in prison.’ And, I said I would do it one library at a time. And, then, through various constraints on the system, I ended up conceptualizing a library as three bookcases that are accessible on each side, that sit about 44-inches high, and have 500 books. And, it has The Iliad, and it has The Odyssey, and it has a lot of other amazing and dope books in it. But we put them on the cell block. So, if you have a prison that has 2,000 people and they’re spread across 20 cell blocks, we would come and put this 500-book, beautiful, handcrafted library, Freedom Library, on each cell block so that the people could read in community.

I want to say one self-serving thing, and I hope you keep this. Not self-serving for me. I want to say a thing that I feel like is really edifying for you. But, kind of self-serving for me, because people always ask me how to curate their library, and it’s a complicated thing where you talk to a lot of people, but some decisions you just make. And, one decision I just made was Adam Smith Can Save Your Life: I put that in my Freedom Library. And, I’ve heard you talk about it as a self-help book. I think it’s a sophisticated self-help book, but I would agree that it’s a book that’s given me real practical advice on how to live.

So, one of my friends, his name is Anthony Wen[?Wynn?Nyuen?]–he’s incarcerated in Virginia–and one of my colleagues named Craig Gore, they’re working on an essay. So, Craig wanted to interview somebody who has lived with a Freedom Library. And, Anthony, they started a book club, and they read 24 books together. They read Don Quixote, they read all kinds of things. They read some Oscar Wilde, they read all kinds of things.

So, he says, ‘Anthony, can you tell me what book you found to be the one that you just have to talk about that you read in the Freedom Library?’ And, first he said, ‘How many books have you read, anyway?’ He said, ‘Well, we read 24 for the book club, and I probably read another 40, so I read 60.’

He starts talking about Adam Smith Can Save Your Life. And, I’m listening to these two men–both of these men are about 50-years-old–and he’s talking about the book. He was, like, ‘Yeah, you know Adam Smith? Everybody says he founded capitalism, but it turns out he wrote this other book called The Theory of Moral Sentiment.’ And, he spent the next three-and-a-half minutes waxing poetic about Adam Smith. It was so thoughtful, so interesting, so engaging that at the end of the riff, Craig said, ‘Wait a minute, tell me who wrote that book again? Tell me the name of the book. I need to get that book.’ And, this is what the Freedom Library does. It creates these moments that are radically unpredictable, unexpected.

Another book he talked about was A Gentleman in Moscow. And, what I just found beautiful was that he, in real time, over a 15-minute interview, just talked about why books open up portals to community, to grace, to self-reflection.

And, I feel like, in a very real way, this is the first time in my life, actually, that I read a book in concert with somebody and engaged with the book in this way. Because as I was reading it, I was thinking about our conversation. I was highlighting sections, but I also, because I read it so quickly, found me losing myself in this book, also me losing myself in another layer of developing a friendship. Which is the kind of thing that I don’t know if it’s as efficient a way to do something like this in this kind of compressed time, where every emotion in my life got connected to this reading of the book. Which meant that every emotion in my life got connected to this conversation. Which means that now, you have become a different kind of friend to me. So, I really do appreciate this because it was pretty dope.

Dwayne Betts: If This Is a Man.

Dwayne Betts: Survival in Auschwitz, yeah.

Dwayne Betts: No. It’s an amazing book. I’m so happy to have gotten a chance to engage with it. And, I forgot about the other two books, but I think this was the first original book, but both of those. I opened my solo show up with a piece from If This Is a Man. The connection, where literally every time I perform my solo show, so at this point probably dozens of times, I’ve opened it up with a passage. I’m on a stage and I take the book off of the Freedom Library, and I open it up and the bookmark is a piece of handmade paper from some clothes of some friends of mine who did time in prison–I turned it into paper. And, I read the part that has this one line, it says–

Dwayne Betts: Okay, I’ll read it. He says,

He told me his story and today I had forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic disturbing necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, Ukraine and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible. But, are they not themselves stories of a new bible? [–If This Is a Man, by Primo Levi]

And yeah, I say it from the stage. And then the next thing I say is, I say, ‘What do you see when you hear the word prison?’ And then, I go into this 90-minute conversation about my life and incarceration and books.

But, the beautiful thing about it is people will always say, ‘Is the story that you tell just a story about what’s in the four pages of the piece,’ like what’s in the four corners of a contract? But, it’s like no, the story, the capaciousness of The Iliad, what I just learned is that it escapes the pages relentlessly. It refuses to be constrained by the fact that it’s seemingly just about a war. It makes itself about so many different elements of your life. And I think the same is always true for a good book. And, that thing that happens becomes exponentially more true when you read in the company of a generous, and intelligent, and thoughtful, funny friend.

So, that’s what I will say: is that I didn’t know that Homer and The Iliad would be a passageway to deepening a friendship. I just thought it was something that I would check off and say, ‘I read it. I’ve read The Iliad.’ And now I’m thinking, no, it’s a great book, but I have profound connections with the world after having read it. It’s not just something to check off on the I’ve-read-this great book. It’s almost like I lived the book and having lived it, I’m a different human being.

Dwayne Betts: Thank you. Thank you.