I.

I see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on a day that feels like the end of the world. Hazy, yellow wildfire smoke drifts down and blankets New York City. You can barely see five blocks, and they tell us that breathing the air is like smoking twelve cigarettes. I come into the lobby of the theater from the blanket of humidity and heat amongst the skyscraper tholoi and start scanning the room. I am looking for the classicists. My friend Joel, whose review essay you have presumably just read, assembled seventeen classicists and public intellectuals to see the film together. The gathering ends in Variety magazine, which suggests the whole feedback loop that surrounds this film as cultural moment, critique-on-critique like bone-on-bone Nestorian joints creaking. It’s end-of-the-world Odyssey summer, and not because of the Sea Peoples.

We have all come out of the cloisters of our writing and research for this, in the off-season. I see a guy in glasses I would buy standing like he is perceiving too much of everything. I ask him if he is one of Joel’s classicists—he is. We share a first name and a certain bearing, tired augurs with bad news. The bad news is not about Bronze Age agriculture and the collapse of trade routes. It is about literacy. Sitting between two of the classicists, from different New York universities, we all agree we cannot assign anything substantial as reading anymore. Undergraduate literacy, even at high-ranking research institutions in America, is the thing that’s collapsing. If we assign a text, we all must go through it line by line in class laboriously. There simply isn’t time to learn much without the assumed habitus of reading. The Americanized form of the nineteenth-century German research university, to which most of us are at least peripherally attached, is as fragile as the end of Mycenean palace culture, and its end is perhaps now as flatly obvious as Nolan’s Odysseus’ intonation that “our age of Bronze is collapsing.” We’re standing in a movie theater lobby, watching it, the Nolan and collapse mapped onto each other.