“You’re all very smart and very accomplished, but this morning I want to talk about being dumb, about the importance of making mistakes,” Daniel Mendelsohn, author, critic, translator and literature professor at Bard College, told Upper School Spence students this May.

 

Mendelsohn, whose speech was titled “Too Clever by Half: Smart Characters and Dumb Mistakes in the Odyssey,” served as the speaker for the Anne Sophie Laumont ’99 Lecture, which has celebrated and memorialized the late Spence student annually for the last 20 years.

 

Seniors Eliza G. and Brooke H. introduced Mendelsohn, whom they met last year in Head of the English Department Kate Reynold’s class. Eliza mentioned that reading his essay “The American Boy” in The New Yorker made her run out to buy one of Mendelsohn’s books, and it moved Brooke to tears.

 

“It is rare for us to read an essay that moves us to tears, and it is even rarer for us to meet the person who wrote it,” Eliza said.

 

While Mendelsohn described himself as “merely an okay high school student,” he praised the Spence students for being the some of the brightest, most motivated and accomplished in society. The crux of his talk, however, was what happens when bright people like themselves make mistakes and what they can learn from those experiences.

 

“As somebody who is a writer, I want to talk to you about this because, in fact, mistakes, errors, getting things wrong all happen to be one of the great themes of great literature,” Mendelsohn said. “There would be no stories, no plots, no novels to read, no literature itself, if characters did not make mistakes or get things terribly wrong. Every great work of literature in every culture is coiled around the story of somebody screwing up.”

 

Mendelsohn talked about how these mistakes create knots in the plot that must be untied—allowing for the dénouement (literally, “an untying”) of the story. He posited that Homer’s The Odyssey offers several good lessons on what happens when smart characters make dumb mistakes.

 

He recounted the story of Odysseus and his men who become trapped in a cave with the Cyclops. Odysseus manages to escape because of his clever use of language; he tells the Cyclops that his name is “Outis,” which can be translated to “nobody.” (“Outis” is also very similar to another word, “metis,” which can be used to mean “clever intelligence.”)

 

When Odysseus and his men manage to blind the Cyclops, who howls in pain and attracts the attention of neighbors who ask him who is hurting him, the Cyclops responds that nobody (or clever intelligence) is hurting him. The men escape, but before they leave the island, Odysseus can’t stop himself from triumphantly telling the Cyclops his real name and origin. The Cyclops then uses this information to ask his father, Poseidon, to curse Odysseus and his men on their journey home. Mendelsohn suggested this serves as a lesson that “as smart as we are, we still need to exercise control.”

 

Odysseus returns home to find that everyone has lost hope that he would come back, and his wife Penelope has over 100 suitors waiting for her hand in marriage. Odysseus reunites with his son, Telemachus, and a few loyal servants who fight the suitors; luckily, they have the advantage of access to a storeroom with armor and weapons. However, Telemachus accidentally leaves the door to the storeroom open, so their adversaries are able to arm themselves as well. When Odysseus laments that the suitors have found the weapons, Telemachus immediately acknowledges that it was his fault, without providing excuses. In response, Odysseus, who usually responds with recrimination, says nothing and forgives his son.

 

Mendelsohn argued that Telemachus learns to own his actions, both good and bad, rather than try to conceal them throughout the epic poem. Odysseus also sees the power in both knowing what to say and what not to say.    

 

“[Odysseus] only rose to his best self when he understood that he still had a lot to learn even from someone much younger than himself, which is to say of course, from someone your age— the student, so to speak—a youth who exemplified the special dignity that goes with a willingness to admit that you don’t yet know everything. That, of course, is a lesson we can all learn from.”