In college, I copied lectures by hand while my classmates filmed the professor on cassette recorders. I'm sixty-two now, learning Spanish, and still filling notebooks. On why handwriting is the one method that works for me — and what Pushkin and Coleridge knew about writing in the margins of books.

After the Iliad post I read Emily Wilson's Odyssey. The reading was harder than I expected, because the classics I love I love through Russian. What Wilson did to Odysseus, and what Zhukovsky and the older English translators kept doing to him for two hundred years, turned out to be the same question.

I keep returning to the Iliad. The question I answer differently as I grow older is which of the three, Achilles, Hector, or Odysseus, is the real hero. The teenage answer was one of them. The answer now is a different one entirely, and I think I can defend it.