2019-11-04_The_New_Yorker_

THE MAIL

THE NEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 3

In the nineteen-sixties, I read “Gil-

gamesh” as a literature student at Wil-

liam Penn, a small Midwestern Quaker

college. The English translation we

had at the time was, as I recall, quite

literal, and the sexual parts were ren-

dered in Latin, in what had to have

been, even then, an archaic attempt

to protect our young minds. Fortu-

nately, I had enough Church Latin to

make out the meaning.

Pat Sodak

Oskaloosa, Iowa

1

THE LIVES OF ARTISTS

Reading Dana Goodyear’s Profile of

the photographer Thomas Joshua

Cooper, I was moved by the descrip-

tion of his environmental photogra-

phy (“The Ends of the Earth,” Octo-

ber 7th). I always enjoy New Yorker

articles about artists and intellectuals,

but I couldn’t help thinking about

what it would be like to live with some-

one like Cooper—or, in the case of

his daughters, to not live with him, as

he travelled incessantly in the singu-

lar pursuit of his art. After I read the

scene in which he tries to capture a

shot on a beach while his wife, stand-

ing next to him, is sick with the flu,

my desire to know more about Coo-

per slackened, and it isn’t surprising

that his daughter has written a “sear-

ing” essay about growing up in the

shadow of her father’s art. We are all

familiar with the trope of the difficult

but brilliant artist—indeed, some of

this magazine’s best recent reporting

has been about the painful realities of

such people. I find myself wondering

how best to celebrate these artists’

work while taking into account the

complexities of their lives.

Jeanne Bonner

West Hartford, Conn.

MEANINGS OF “GILGAMESH”

Joan Acocella, in her review of Michael
Schmidt’s “Gilgamesh: The Life of a
Poem,” captures the timelessness of this
ancient story (Books, October 14th).
She points out that the poem has been
studied for “only seven or eight” gener-
ations, as opposed to about a hundred
and fifty for the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The comparative recency of the schol-
arship, she writes, means that there is no
“real tradition” for reading “Gilgamesh.”
This may be true, but it is worth not-
ing that, in Waldorf schools all over the
world, fifth graders have been studying
this epic as a standard part of the cur-
riculum since the movement’s founding,
in 1919. In my classroom, students read
a version of the poem and, using Pop-
sicle sticks as styluses, pressed wedge-
shaped cuneiform into clay tablets. As
those of us in the boomer generation
confront the inevitability of aging and
mortality, we should add “Gilgamesh”
to our reading lists.
Maureen Shaughnessy
Lake Orion, Mich.

I was pleased to see Acocella’s article on
“Gilgamesh,” a work that has been im-
portant to me as both a scholar and a
person. I was surprised, however, by her
characterization of the tests imposed on
the hero as he seeks immortality as “silly.”
On the contrary, they are a highlight of
the poem. To prove that he is worthy
of that ultimate prize, Gilgamesh must
go without sleep for six days. He ac-
cepts the challenge, but “sleep swirls
over him like a mist,” and he succumbs.
To mark the passage of time while Gil-
gamesh sleeps, a loaf of bread is set out
each day. By the time he wakes up, the
loaves are in progressive states of decay,
showing the perishability of living mat-
ter, which Gilgamesh, like humanity as
a whole, has failed to transcend. The
message—if you can conquer your un-
conscious, you can conquer death—is a
profound one, in line with mystical texts
from many traditions.
Michael Nagler
Tomales, Calif.

•

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