Our Summer Series: From Homer to Harkness
The Story Behind Our Stories
There are some stories we never really leave.
We encounter them as children, meet them again in school, recognize them in novels, films, and paintings, and then, years later, discover they have been quietly shaping our imagination all along.
This summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey returns one of those stories to the big screen. It’s a timely reminder that Homer’s epic has never really disappeared. It has simply changed form, finding new life in every generation that chooses to tell it again.
That idea has been on my mind for weeks.
Not because I’m interested in comparing one story to another, but because I’m fascinated by what happens underneath them.
As readers, we often ask where a story is going.
As a historian, Deborah Harkness asks a different question:
Where did this story come from?
It’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved the All Souls novels. Diana Bishop doesn’t simply solve mysteries. She uncovers the history beneath them. Manuscripts have owners. Symbols have origins. Libraries remember things that people forget.
That perspective has inspired this summer’s series.
Over the next several weeks, I’d like to wander through the landscapes that lie behind some of our favorite stories—not only The Odyssey and All Souls, but the older traditions that connect them.
We’ll visit ancient Greece and Renaissance Europe.
We’ll explore libraries, maps, cups, olive trees, manuscripts, and heirlooms.
We’ll ask why certain symbols have survived for thousands of years while others have quietly disappeared.
Most of all, we’ll follow the long conversation that stories have been having with one another for centuries.
Because perhaps no story is ever entirely new.
Every great book carries traces of the books that came before it.
Every library holds echoes.
And somewhere between Homer and Harkness is a path worth following.
I hope you’ll join me.