Kale Zelden is a long-time prep school teacher of literature and humanities at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island, where he guides students through the great works of Western civilization—from Homer and Dante to Milton and Lewis. Kale writes The Underneath, a Substack exploring new emanations and emergences of old patterns, where he connects modern seekers with buried and forsaken wisdom. His work examines what he calls “the underneath”—that form of knowing that is real but cannot be rationalized, the deeper truths that modernity’s focus on the measurable and verifiable often misses. He hosts a podcast by the same name and has taught courses on Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Kale shares threads about patterns, observations, and the enduring relevance of old books. His presentation on the nature of epic will draw on his background teaching the classical tradition and his conviction that the metaphors we live and the epic stories we retell shape the civilization we build.