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Unbecoming
... Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods
Though teenagers adore Odysseus, action hero, here's what they don't get: Penelope as a romantic lead. She makes them squirm. They want a Juliet (not someone's mother)—and for Telémakhos. The royal pair mingled in love, they read, disgusted: Over forty, love is gross.
But in his own way, Beowulf is worse. Fifty winters a king, and at his gold jubilee he slays the Geatish curse? A dragon? He's, like, seventy; he's old! Unseemly! Some day soon they'll get the verse about old age—to strive, to seek, to find what some day they will need: an open mind.
Deborah Warren
(c) 1999; originally printed in
The Formalist. |