The Odyssey

Embracing Mediocrity

IN THE EARLY 1970S in the Boston area it wasn’t unusual to start studying Latin in seventh grade. Almost all the schools, public and private, taught it. I suspect this had something to do with Boston’s large and influential Irish Catholic population (even after the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965, Mass in Boston was still occasionally celebrated in Latin). Studying Latin was particularly not unusual at my school because we had the kind of Latin teacher who was so popular that he could have been teaching Uighur and his class still would have been filled to bursting with kids who wanted not just to take the class but to be able to say they had taken it, to trade stories with those who had sat in those seats before. So, at age twelve, I started Latin.

Literature is full of books about great teachers: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and Goodbye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton, to name just two. Mr. Gill, my seventh-grade Latin teacher, was the kind of inspired, charismatic teacher who deserves a book of his own.

“Ah, dawn breaks over Marblehead,” Mr. Gill would say when you got an answer right. We thought this expression was a riot; Marblehead was a nearby Massachusetts town. We didn’t just want to learn from Mr. Gill—we wanted to be him and would greet one another as he greeted us: “Hi, hi, how are you?” pronounced in his broad Boston accent as “Hi, hi, how ah yuh?” The answer was always: “Gud, gud, ya-self?”

Mr. Gill believed that students learn best when multiple senses are engaged, so he had us sing the Latin declensions in unison to allow us to hear them fully voiced; he also required each of us to create our own set of Latin-English flashcards so we could touch the words we were learning. Smell and taste were the senses he left out.

Each week after collecting our homemade flashcards, he would fling them back at us Frisbee-style, with uncanny aim. It was a point of pride not to fumble your set when it was tossed at you and also incentive to stay awake lest your cards go flying by while you were dozing.

We learned French to go to France (one day, we hoped). We learned history because, we were told, if we didn’t we were destined to repeat it. We learned math so we could learn more math (at least that’s how it was explained to us: if we didn’t take geometry, we couldn’t take trig, and if we didn’t take trig, then we couldn’t take calculus—no wonder I stopped as soon as I could, to my eternal regret). But Latin—Latin was going to teach us things. Exactly what? Well, that we had to wait to find out.

First came Caesar. From him I learned that Gaul was divided in three parts. And I learned a lot of military maneuvers and wondrous facts about the Roman Empire and neighboring nations. (According to Caesar, the barbarian men of early Britain dyed themselves a fierce shade of blue and shaved their entire bodies except for the hair on top of their head and their mustaches; they were also polygamous.) We spent a lot of time reading Caesar. It was very enjoyable. But Mr. Gill spoke with such reverence about what the classics had to teach us that I kept waiting for a piece of knowledge that would knock me off my chair. I was hoping that the thing I would learn would be something intense, that after a certain point I would become like a Mason, someone who had secrets and shares them with others who had been through the same rigorous initiation. And after I learned that thing, I hoped and trusted, my life would never be the same.

In the meantime, however, I started to glimpse a great truth: history was long and I was short. Caesar accomplished more than I ever possibly could; had written about it in timeless works; and would be read as long as people read. There was no chance I would possibly leave a mark on the world that measured up to Caesar’s.

When I went to high school, at a boarding school, I decided to continue with Latin. And I decided to add ancient Greek. I had no good reason for this, just the belief that ancient Greek was truly hard core. If Latin was the Navy, ancient Greek was the Navy SEALs. And, besides, that meant that I would enter the orbit of another charismatic teacher: George Tracy.

Mr. Tracy was highly theatrical—he had been a Shakespearean actor in Canada, the land of his birth. And he was notoriously tough. He didn’t treat us as children; he treated us as adults who had simply neglected, as of yet, to learn all they were supposed to have learned. But when one of his students did show that she or he had learned something—well, then that student was bathed in light.

Traditionally, Greek is taught backward—or, rather, starting at the middle with Plato and moving back. Even though Homer came before Plato, schools would first teach you the kind of Greek Plato wrote and only later the Greek of Homer, more different from the Greek of Plato than Shakespeare’s English is from ours.

Mr. Tracy taught differently. He started with Homer and then moved his students chronologically forward, through Plato, through the dramatists, and finally, in proper order, up to the (much easier) Greek of the New Testament.

This meant a few things. First, it meant that there was only one textbook available: A Reading Course in Homeric Greek. Every other book took the traditional approach of beginning with Plato. Written by Jesuits, this textbook had, as I recall, extremely odd practice sentences: “Had Jesus and Homer met, how well they would have gotten along!” (I remember taking a different view. I also remember wondering if Jesus might have cured Homer’s blindness, whereupon Homer might have chosen a different profession altogether, and then we would never have had access to the great stories he left us.)

Second, it meant that we actually got to start our education with Homer: within months of beginning ancient Greek, I was translating bits of The Iliad into English. It was thrilling.

Granted, my translations were not ones for the ages.

What ho! Eternal Aegis-bearing Zeus’s child,

The Greeks spring forth towards their native land,

To head for home o’er watery paths now wild,

Leaving Helen to Priam and the Trojan’s Hands.

Where Mr. Gill might have gently suggested I go back to my vocabulary cards, Mr. Tracy scowled fiercely. He told me that there was no particular call for a modern translation of The Iliad that attempted to ape the style of Alexander Pope. I’m sure he added that modern English would do just fine and asked me to please, please stop rhyming and instead focus on the meaning of the words I was translating.

But I was hooked. If I was looking for the secret that would connect me to others around the world and across the ages, The Iliad and The Odyssey were it. Thrilling. This was a whole world I had no idea existed—a world of honor and hubris, lust and war, fidelity and betrayal. This was a deeply adult world, too, a world of violence, sex, and drugs.

First in my affections was Odysseus. Here was a real hero. He is wily, able to outsmart the Cyclops. He is strong, a leader of men. He perseveres. And he is deeply fallible, making a whole lot of flawed choices due to lust, pride, and bad judgment.

I was also quite taken with the idea of the land of the Lotus-eaters, where Odysseus stops and where he almost loses a portion of his crew. The land of the Lotus-eaters is a seeming paradise where time passes effortlessly; the visitor, happily drugged, forgets all thoughts of what he needs to do in life and abandons all plans to return home. Growing up in the shadow of the 1960s, I felt I understood the appeal of this land: I had met plenty of people just a few years older than I who had found themselves there and who hadn’t been able to leave. Odysseus underscored the point that, though you can visit the land of the Lotus-eaters, the time will come when you definitely need to leave it. Of course, that’s not always easy to do. But if you overstay that time, you may never be able to leave. Ever.

As Mr. Tracy guided us through The Odyssey, he had us keep one word foremost in our minds: “nostalgia.” This was not the kind of nostalgia we speak of today, where you squeal with delight and only the slightest pang of longing when a song you slow-danced to in the 1970s—“Blame It on the Sun” by Stevie Wonder, perhaps, or “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac—comes on the radio. Actually, even radios are cause for nostalgia today. No, this was nostalgia in the true meaning of the word: home pain. A longing that is so intense you experience it as you would the most severe malady. The child who sobs inconsolably on a night spent with strangers far from home, not knowing if she will ever return to the place where she grew up and the people who raised her, experiences the nostalgia of Odysseus. It’s a homesickness that is so profound it causes almost unbearable pain.

How long can you stay in the land of the Lotus-eaters? How do you handle the pain when you don’t know if you can ever get home or when your home is gone? I was starting to realize that reading Greek and Latin wasn’t going to give me any single piece of knowledge that would astound me or one secret that would change my life; it was giving me instead something more valuable: a lifetime of questions.

Over the next few years, I continued to study classics: with Mr. Tracy; with an impassioned and engaging young colleague of his whom we called Doc Marshall (as though he were a character in a Western and not a Ph.D. in classics); and then with a series of eccentric professors all the way through college (one of whom was forbidden by his doctor from reading Thucydides because it made his heart race). But as much as I learned from the books I read and from these teachers over so many years, and as many great questions as I added to my repertoire, one of the most important things I learned came in my first few weeks with Mr. Tracy. And it was a lesson in learning.

The assignment was simple—a paper on some classical topic about which little is known or can be learned. But I’d worked hard (or, at least, many hours) on it and was convinced I had created a work of brilliance. As a result, I was excited to get the graded paper back a few days later—and then bitterly disappointed to discover that Mr. Tracy had given me a C.

I asked to see Mr. Tracy after class.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said, somewhat tentatively. “But I really think I deserved a B.”

Mr. Tracy looked at me with no discernible emotion; then he pulled out a big red felt-tip marker. He carefully crossed out the C. And then he wrote a big B and gave it back to me, but not before he paused and asked a key question: “Are you sure you don’t want an A?”

Since I had not been prepared for a quick victory, and had a whole speech at the ready, I didn’t know what to say. But then I realized where this was going.

Mr. Tracy waited a moment and then said, “It’s a C paper. No matter what grade I put on it, it’s still a C paper. But I’m happy to give it a B or even an A. In fact, why don’t you just tell me what grade you want when you hand in each paper for the rest of the term and save me the trouble of grading them.”

Then Mr. Tracy really went for it. “In fact, why don’t you just tell me what grade you want for the whole course so you don’t have to show up at all.”

I had to beg Mr. Tracy to give me my C back. Eventually I got it.

What I thought I learned that afternoon was not to grade grub.

But on reflection, I now realize that what Mr. Tracy taught me that day was to recognize my mediocrity. And that, in fact, the essence of learning is to do just that.

A C means you’ve done average work. There’s nothing shameful about being average. You didn’t fail. You didn’t even come close. You did what you were supposed to do. Cheerfully accepting the C means that you recognize there’s such a thing as a B and an A and that you know you fell short of both; you can take pride in your place in the middle of the pack but still appreciate that there’s room to grow.

Mediocrity isn’t crass or shoddy or vulgar. It’s, well, mediocre. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not bad. When you embrace mediocrity, you embrace humility—you learn to see that no matter how good you are at something, the world probably has people who are more talented at it than you. You can strive to learn from people who do things better, or you can at least appreciate them—even if you don’t want to be them. By definition, most of us are mediocre, and everyone is mediocre at something.

It’s often just a matter of perspective. The best pitcher on your local Little League team wouldn’t last long on the mound in the major leagues. Great teachers help us see ourselves in the broadest perspective possible. Mr. Tracy may have wanted to teach me a lesson about my own arrogance, but he certainly wasn’t trying to discourage me: He was trying to get me to see things as they really are. Encouragement comes in many forms, but excessive or unwarranted praise isn’t encouragement.

The British essayist G. K. Chesterton, in his 1910 treatise What’s Wrong with the World, wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Sure, it may be worth more done well, but if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing no matter how well or badly you do it. It’s just plain worth doing. When we denigrate mediocrity, we discourage ourselves and others from trying new things. It would be great to be a great painter, but it’s also great just to paint. Or sing or throw pots or knit scarves or play chess.

That doesn’t mean, though, we should lower our standards. In fact, it’s partly this unwarranted horror of mediocrity that causes us to call things great that are merely good or fine. There are plenty of good slices of pizza to be had in Greenwich Village that are neither the best nor the worst slices in New York City. We don’t have to pretend they are something more than tasty and filling to enjoy them. We might even want to try to make our own mediocre pizza from time to time.

And as for Odysseus, even he would have to admit that he didn’t do a great job of getting home. Sure, he was a clever fellow but an arrogant one, too, a boaster and troublemaker. Others managed to come right home after the war chronicled in The Iliad; it took Odysseus ten years. He was held captive; he dawdled; he got lost. He was caught in storms. And he almost gave up his quest—to live with Circe, an enchantress who also happened to be an excellent cook.

But he does eventually make it back (with help from some gods) to Ithaca, where life is in massive disarray. The return is a solid C-level performance—far from an A, sure, but by no means a failure.