Iliad Speak
Unfortunately, I have discovered Audible. I had heard about it for years before trying it out. Oh, what I had been missing. It allowed me to finally hear, in their entirety, the epics of the classical world: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. Despite a parochial school education where I learned more about the sermon on the mount than the city on an escarpment along the Darden shore, I read snippets of these classics or watched the many iterations of The Iliad on television. You know the kind; low budget Italian movies featuring men in skimpy costumes slugging it out in front of Trojan walls with swords, shields, and spears. While I knew the stories, I had never really read them. The one time I tried that Homerian classic I kept falling asleep as I read at bedtime.
Enter Audible. Being a person who hates to waste time, I could multi-task while exercising. Listening and walking helped me rack up the miles as I absorbed the actor, Dan Stevens, read the ancient story of the Trojan war.
Yet there was a downside. Sure, feeling better and losing pounds while gaining a deeper appreciation for the foundations of our Western traditions was all good, but I noticed, slowly in the beginning and then widening, that I was speaking differently.
I began using epithets and metaphors. This was alternatingly bewildering and entertaining to me (and others) as I became aware of just how deeply I was being consumed with a need to elevate everyday language into something more…well, elaborate.
Pontificating, and employing a stentorian tone, I found myself not so much talking, as presenting. At a negotiation when the CFO of a company with which we wished to merge proposed a win for them but a loss for us the first response in my head went something like this: “We, on the eve of joining our houses in a marriage bond, not unlike a rebirth akin to a brotherhood, are asked to sacrifice on the altar of your clan, an arm from each of our firstborn. For the honor of entering such a noble house? Show me the baker of this bread, so that I may thank him with the full heft of my blade!”
Or, while walking, being chased by a not just a dog, but a hound. I stopped, turned to the canine and cursed it thus: “You there! Oh foul footed one, with you fangs barred and muscles tensed, though your ears fold over your skull, I see you shake. Urine leaks from your sex as you quake on your paws wracked with terror. Me? Fear you? Ha! My walking stick will cleave your head like the butcher’s blade your buttocks will. Your blood will spill onto the parkway in reposeful drams, nourishing the fine soil of this fair Elysium. Pray to Hecate’s hounds you cur! Meet your doom!”
Once I finished that great trilogy from antiquity, our modern era thrust itself back into my lexicon with all the brevity associated with our modern manner. Once again, merger meetings resulted in curt responses of “No. I won’t agree to that.” And to an off leash canine encountered on a walk there was again a stern admonishment to keep away, ordered with a guttural “No!”.
My speech has become much more utilitarian, returning to the colorless utterings that characterize our lives. But my walks go on, and I’m pondering what to ‘listen’ to next. I’m thinking I’ll try the Book of Genesis.
