The Long View Letters
Issue 07 ( July 12, 2026)
Field Notes:
(Pluto, Odyssey, and Pining for Daddy)
After a hectic June, I rather hoped July would be quiet. My plan was to nest and rest, at least for the first fortnight. Honour Cancer season.
Instead, the month has kept me on my feet – literal and metaphorical. So, this edition of The Long View Letters is more field note than essay.
The internet likes to joke about Mercury Retrograde. But if the messages which suddenly popped up in my phone, the accounts I was logged out of, and the delays in commuting are anything to go by – I’d say Mercury is doing what it can, not only what it must. Or maybe it's Chiron. Uranus. Or just the earth.
With Nolan’s Odyssey set to release next week – it feels right to expand the frame, and consider more than human agencies.
Odyssey will possibly be the first movie I watch in the theatre in a long long time. I am not a movie buff. I claim neither inclination nor taste. For me, the cinematic arts are a means to relax my brain and not exercise it. So, I rewatch series: The Mentalist, Modern Family, Ludwig. I enjoy movies like The Sheep Detectives. And Would I Lie To You clips top my YouTube carousel.
But for the Odyssey – I am willing to make an effort.
Before the movie though, following a recommendation from an essayist, I have decided to read Stephen Lombardo’s The Essential Odyssey. Finally. I am a student of literature who has read not a single epic in its entirety. The Mahabharata, Ramayana, Iliad, Odyssey and other world epics are texts I tilt at continually – but at an angle.
For example, as a child I would go with my mother to listen to the oral retellings of the Ramayana that form so much of the vernacular culture of India’s Hindi-speaking belt. I have read Yuganta – a collection of essays from the POV of a few characters of the Mahabharata, the Song of Achilles in its entirety, and then listened to Circe almost up to the very end. The echoes of the epics through literature have always resonated with me.
In fact, during my master’s, my dissertation piece was a radio play where the Greek gods go to dinner and quarrel with each other. And one of my essays was on the epic. I enjoy scale, finding it possible to suspend disbelief. Perhaps this might explain why I avidly watched the Avenger movies, until Endgame and not at all after, when it descended into bathos.
So, when, after reading a couple of books/chapters in Lombardo’s translation – I looked up the trailer, I was expecting to be awed by the IMAX scale. And I was. But what I was not expecting was to hear Tom Holland’s Telemachus say ‘Dad’ in an American accent, or to hear Robert Pattinson's Antinous say ‘pining for your daddy.’
Disconcerting.
Clearly, the movie cares about scale. Here gods, humans and monsters must inhabit the same frame. But what about register?
Emily Wilson considers this in the afterword to her book Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature. She writes, “Some writers and translators think that the only way for a translation to be engaging for young readers is if it is full of American slang or cliches. This is false. Everyone, including young people, deserves to learn new things.”
What will happen when I see Cyclops and hear contemporary accents? Being neither a classicist nor a critic – I have only questions.
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While waiting for the movie to release, I finally began watching Slow Horses – an Apple TV adaptation of Mick Herron’s espionage novels starring Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden. The show revolves around a group of intelligence officers exiled from MI-5 because of career-ending errors. Exile is the word. Most of them live in a London grey zone, hoping to return to the head office, to field work, to purpose, much like Odysseus waits to return to Ithaca.
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Yesterday, I finally stepped out for an event instead of an errand. My destination was a pub where a PhD student would tell us about exo-planets (planets outside the solar system). I reached late thanks to an unfounded trust in Google Maps and followed little of the narrative picking facts sporadically.
But it cheered me up to hear about Pluto. Here is a dwarf planet still orbiting the sun demoted from its former status. The lecturer joked that Pluto had been removed from the group chat but couldn’t care less.
One of my favourite memes draws on this and says, “Pluto doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Pluto just goes on revolving around the sun. Be like Pluto.”
The meme is epic in its own way. Making humour through conflating and contrasting scale. Much like the English poets of the 17th century.
The lecturer went on to talk
about planets with diamonds in their atmosphere, planets that orbit two stars (there was a Star Wars reference), and mini-Neptunes. I left as he was answering questions.
On the way back, I suddenly spotted the entrance to one of the older capitals that formed the cluster we call Delhi today. It is said to have been built by a king who inspired many a song. I have often gone seeking after this place before, but yesterday, when I was barely looking, it found me.
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Last night, as I tried to recollect facts from the lecture, I had more questions.
Why are we looking for planets so far out after all? Don’t we already have one?
Scientific imperatives aside, here’s the one answer that stayed with me.
No matter how far we go, or how we define our expeditions, we’re looking for bio-signatures. Our mission is to scout for signs of life, for new places we could call home.
Best,
Skendha
The Long View Letters
P.S. Thank you for staying with me on this one. Are you planning to watch Tom Holland speaking in an American accent in Ithaca or Tom Holland speaking in an American accent in Queens, N.Y.? I’d love to hear from you.
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