The Iliad of Homer - Part Two

In my last post, I shared details of reading The Iliad, and of being pleasantly surprised with its accessibility. In this post I want to add a footnote about an unusually compelling theme that was referenced in the afterword of my Rouse translation. This theme proves that the Iliad is much more than a book about war-hungry men! (If you don't know the story at all, this post contains a major spoiler about the ending. But if you are familiar with the basic details of the story, these details will only enhance your reading of it.)

Adam Nicolson writes, For Homer, suffering is hinged to an unresolvable conflict between two inescapable elements of human nature: the ties that bind (family, friendship, community) and the blades that cut through those bindings (such as war). The war is shown against the backdrop of the people, homes and families of Troy. It is violence against domestic order.

To Homer, the city, the realm of family and connection, makes a stand against the chaos. In Troy, woven cloth becomes the medium for his story. When Helen first appears, she is in the hall of her house, weaving. In Book 3, she is working woven images into a tapestry showing the battles that have been fought over her. Helen, as she remembers the source of grief, becomes like Homer, the weaver of the tale.

[Outside the gates of Troy] where the battlefield is a careless and pitiless place, the allure and goodness of the besieged city become ever more precious. Achilles is determined to destroy the Trojans. They flee from his wrath back into the city – all except Hector, their champion, who must remain out on the plain with his adversary.

This is not just the meeting of Achilles and Hector; it is the deathly confrontation of two ways of understanding the world. The city is goodness and connection; the battlefield is horror and death. With Hector’s death, the city’s fabric is irreparably torn.

I have to confess that I missed that theme entirely! But like any classic, there will always be layers of meaning that surface with each subsequent reading.

I will close with just one quote comparing the two versions that I read. (Pope gets a bad rap for his translation, but I enjoyed his energetic eloquence.)

Few and short had his days been when Ajax laid him low, and he never paid to his parents the debt of a grateful son. (W.H.D. Rouse)

Lamented youth! In life’s first bloom he fell, sent by great Ajax to the shades of hell. (Alexander Pope)

P.S. Regarding translations, the majority of readers on the Lit Life Facebook page recommend Lattimore. Coincidentally, last week's Literary Life Podcast was about how to get started reading the ancient classics.

Blessings,

Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs

According to Alan Jacobs, as our society becomes more and more immersed in digital realities, we are losing our personal density. He wrote this book to encourage his audience to learn to think more deeply by reading more widely.

He begins by explaining why our thinking has become so thin. Because of the deluge of information pouring into our minds via screens, we must, of necessity, practice a form of informational triage. We simply cannot read everything so we choose those subjects which are immediately interesting, and topics which are generally written from the point of view of those with whom we agree.

There is no time to think about anything else. This preoccupation with the present, with no regard for history or past ideas, leads to a “lightweight” existence that is easily toppled by life’s hard knocks. Jacobs believes that reading old books (and grappling with their ideas) can give us a stability that is not easily shaken by each current event or recent mode of thinking.

Jacobs encourages us to read older books with a generosity toward the author, which means that instead of writing them off for being racist, sexist, white or male, etc., we need to be gracious toward them and give them more of your attention than you may at certain moments feel that they deserve – because you hope that something good will come of it. At the very least you hope for an expansion of your own understanding.

He writes, I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness. When we read something that startles us (or with which we disagree) we are naturally tempted to close the book. But if we disregard all past authors for differences we have with them, our pool of candidates for our attention will get smaller and smaller.  Eventually we get a nicely manageable collection of ideas, all of which are more or less the same. But this limited understanding of the world leaves us impoverished.

G.K. Chesterton’s argued that when we ignore the history and ideas of the past, we do so at our own peril. If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the nightclubs. (from his essay: On Man – Heir of All Ages)

I learned a lot from this book, but while reading, I had to practice what Jacobs preached. Although I sometimes disliked his disdainful tone, I kept going because his main emphases are ideas that are very important to me. If only he had been as generous to those with whom he disagrees (who are still living) as he is with writers of the past. 

Blessings,

Antigone by Sophocles

When the Literary Life group decided to read the Greek play Antigone, I gave it a pass. With a towering TBR list, I assumed I had better things to read. Silly me. When I saw that the audiobook was just over an hour, I caved in. Surprisingly, I didn't need the Lit Life group to understand the beauty and power of this short play. 

For one thing, the opening paragraph (called "The Argument") gives an overview of the story's principal events so you never have to wonder what is going on. Then comes a brief list of characters (the last two books I read would have been so much easier to understand if I'd had that!) After that, the reader plunges right in. I admit that having some background in Shakespearean English (or at least in the King James Bible) would be helpful in understanding the old-fashioned language. Once I got the hang of it, I loved the plucky heroine, the great dialogue, and the gorgeous wording.

The basic story is of a young woman who goes against the king's arbitrary command (to leave her dead brother unburied) and the heavy price everyone pays for it. Many universal themes are introduced, but the main one is civil disobedience. When does loyalty to family override loyalty to government? Antigone argues that the gods would not have approved of the king's edict. So, she is not only being loyal to her brother, but also to a higher Law. She says to King Creon: 

Nor did I deem that thou, a mortal man,

Could'st by a breath annul and override

The immutable unwritten laws of Heaven.

They were not born today nor yesterday;

They die not; and none knoweth whence they sprang. 

It was startling apropos to our present times as the government continues to encroach on personal religious beliefs.  

My translation (free via Hoopla) by Francis Storr was stunning in its beauty. Here are a few favorite quotes: 

Much thought extends a furlong into a league. (Which I loosely interpret to mean, "Overthinking turns an inch into a mile.")

Hope flits about on never-wearying wings. (Do you suppose this line could have inspired Emily Dickinson's famous poem?)

I would not weigh his wealth and power against a dram of joy.

Ironic statement from a position of power: 

Now if she thus can flout authority unpunished,

I am woman, she the man.

On Pride: To err is common

To all men, but the man who having erred

Hugs not his errors, but repents and seeks

The cure, is not a wastrel nor unwise.

No fool, the saying goes, like an obstinate fool.

Word lovers will revel in phrases like, "her brother lay unsepulchered." And the word "snaffle" made me laugh with delight (even though it's only an old-fashioned word for bridle.) Oh, if only I could slip this delightful phrase into a future conversation: "You vex me with your babblement."

A quick, but worthwhile read. I listened, and then loved it so much downloaded a copy to read again the next day.

Blessings,

Heroes and Legends in Literature

I purchased Heroes and Legends: The Most Influential Characters of Literature with a free credit from Audible.com.

Professor Thomas Shippey (who is a Cambridge-educated expert on Medieval literature and a leading world scholar on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien) gives each of the 24 lectures. Each talk offers important insights into the world's great works of literature and why their heroes have lived on in our hearts and imaginations. How could I not love this series when it started out with a most unlikely hero, Frodo Baggins? Shippey explains why the world needed such a hero at that time in history.

Some of the lectures share additional, unknown information about famous characters (such as Robin Hood). Others walk the listener through the character's most famous story (Odysseus). I enjoyed the variety (In Lecture 16 he explains how people gained a taste for lighter reading. In Lecture 22 he talks about fairy tales and their modern feminist versions.) Although the final lectures include people that I would not have selected as literary heroes (Celie from The Color Purple and Winston Smith from 1984, for example), Shippey argues convincingly for their importance.

Shippey's enthusiasm for his subject keeps you listening. It doesn't hurt that he has a marvelous British voice and dry sense of humor. Although he deals with several indiscreet protagonists, he manages to keep the lectures at a PG level. I appreciated that he wasn't too politically correct to note when a character was helped by faith in God.

I've been listening to this off-and-on for three months and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a refresher course on books I'd already read, and whetted my appetite for some of the others, except for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which sounds horrific. I have my doubts about that choice, but figure it was added to appeal to 21st century readers. Otherwise these lectures are highly recommended to literature fans.

(They are ridiculously expensive on the Great Courses site, but are $30 at Amazon/Audible.)

Katherine Paterson on the Importance of Literature

From the book of essays The Invisible Child:

And when you close Homer, there are the books of Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, and great fat volumes of Tolstoy.  There is the Bible, perhaps the most overprescribed and least taken of any. There is Flannery O’Connor and Anne Tyler.There is William Shakespeare and Jacob Bronowski. There is The Yearling and A Tale of Two Cities.  There is The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows.  There is Ramona the Brave and Where the Wild Things Are.  I have only begun to name what I especially love.  There are countless others - really good books.  Good or even great because they make the right connections. They pull together for us a world that is falling apart.  They are the words that integrate us, stretch us, comfort and heal us. They are the words that mirror the Word of creation, bringing order out of chaos. (238-9)

The Western Canon by Harold Bloom

In this 560-page tome Bloom highlights twenty-six writers whose writings set the standard for all literature  that followed them. (Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, Tolstoy, etc.)

I admit it.  I’ve been in awe of Harold Bloom as the “guardian” of classic literature ever since I first heard about him.  I have struggled through several of his books, but The Western Canon was the last one I’ll ever have to read because it knocked him off his pedestal.  I still appreciate, but no longer idolize, him. It's partly because I’ve become more sure of my own reading tastes and am no longer inclined to swallow someone else’s opinions about what I “should” be reading. It's also due to his disturbing view of the Bible. Although he has tremendous respect for it, he believes the Old Testament was written by a woman and that it has been revised beyond recognition from its original texts. Listen to this gobbledygook:

After Shakespeare, the greatest representative of the given is the first author of the Hebrew Bible, the figure named Yahwist or J by nineteenth-century biblical scholarship.  J, like Homer, a person or persons lost in the dark recess of time, appears to have lived in or near Jerusalem some three thousand years ago, well before Homer either lived or was invented.  Just who the primary J was, we are never likely to know.  I speculate, on purely internal and subjective literary grounds, that J may very well have been a woman at King Solomon’s court… [Probably] Bathsheba, mother of Solomon… The J writer was the original author of what we now call Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, But what she wrote was censored, revised, and frequently abrogated or distorted by a series of redactors across five centuries, culminates with Ezra, or one of o his followers, in the era of the return for Babylonian exile….J’s Yahweh is human – all too human; he eats and drinks, , frequently loses his temper, delights in his own mischief, is jealous and vindictive, proclaims his justness while constantly playing favorites, and develops a considerable case of neurotic anxiety … By the time he leads that crazed and suffering rabblement through the Sinai wilderness, he has become so insane and dangerous, to himself and to others, that the J writer deserves to be called the most blasphemous of all authors ever. (p.4, 5)

Really? When you read drivel like that about a book Bloom considers to be one of the absolute greatest in the Western Canon, how can you continue to hope that his other thoughts will be enlightening?

But Bloom isn’t considered the Protector of Great Literature for nothing.  He believes (and rightly so) that great literature will continue to exist, not because it’s “good for you”, but because true readers actually enjoy the stuff.  Sadly, however, (and he’s right again here) colleges and universities will have less and less lit majors.  What are now called “Departments of English” will be renamed departments of “Cultural Studies” where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens. (p. 484)

Dismal but true. This book is worth skimming through to find out why the Great Books are worthy of the name.

Evelyn Waugh on the Classics

From Scott-King's Modern Europe (a story of the declining career of a classics teacher):

"You know," the headmaster said, "we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?"

"I thought that would be about the number."

"As you know I'm an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the 'complete man' any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?"

"Oh yes," said Scott-King. "I can and I do."

"I always say you are much more important man here than I am. One couldn't conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?"

"Oh yes. Often"

"What I was going to suggest was - I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?"

"No, headmaster."

"But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead."

"Yes, headmaster."

"Then what to you intend to do?"

"If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world."

"It's a very short-sighted view, Scott-King."

"There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take."

C.S. Lewis on The Great Books

Few have equaled C.S. Lewis in their ability to distill complicated truths into understandable sentences. He wrote the introduction to a book I am reading now. And his thoughts alone are worth the price of the book. In the intro he writes that novice readers prefer reading modern, "simplified" versions of classic theology and philosophy books because they feel inadequate to understand the original documents. Here is Lewis' response:

This seems topsy-turvy to me... If the ordinary reader must read only the new or the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it...

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.... If the average student wants to find out about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read it. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about "isms" and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for its springs from humility. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

From intro to On The Incarnation by Athanasius

Really Old Classics Challenge

I’m glad I took this challenge. It was humbling because there were several books I started and could not finish, but it was heartening that the other books I tried were not only readable, but highly relevant to modern day questions. (This is the main point of Adler’s How to Read a Book.)

Aesop's Fables was the easiest and most enjoyable read with its timeless moral tales. Reviewed here.

Plato’s Apology was surprisingly simple in its writing style, yet profound in its comments on death and honor. “Virtue” (long-forgotten, yet lovely word) was used quite frequently in the text. How many of us can say as he did, “The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness.”?

He goes on to say that it is pretence to be afraid of death. “Death may be the greatest good.” That phrase struck me hard since I’d just read the same idea in George MacDonald’s “The Golden Key” (Now that you have tasted death, said the Old Man, is it good? It is good, said Mossy. It is better than life. No, said the Old Man: it is only more life. p. 42)

Alcestis by Eurpides was a play I read through DailyReader.net. It is written in simple, beautiful poetry and provided many a morsel of “brain food”. I should say “heart” food because the themes were love, loyalty and self-sacrifice. In this story Alcestis gives up her life to save her husband’s and he remains loyal to her even after her death; when another woman is brought to him, he says, “How could I lay this woman where my bride once lay? It were dishonour double-dyed.” I love language like that.

Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne was a retelling of Greek myths. Review here.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu was, well, boring. But now that I’m reading a book about strategies in WWII, some of them are sounding familiar. The occasional Confucius-like sayings were the only thing that kept me reading:
1) To hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.
2) Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your compactness that of the forest.
3) Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

I’m glad to be officially done with the challenge. I have two other books from the pre-Shakespeare time period that I’d like to try this year, but I’ll write about them later.

How to Read A Book by Mortimer Adler

The first sentence of How to Read a Book says, “I have tried to write a light book about heavy reading. Those who take no pleasure in knowing and understanding should not bother to read it.” He was, in fact, saying, “Read this if you dare. Wimps not welcome!” How could I turn down a challenge like that?!

It soon became clear that this was not a “light” book in the common sense of the word. Adler humbly concedes that his book is easier to read than the heavier books he is promoting, but he also points out that understanding takes effort and he definitely wants the reader to make some effort. He contends that “All books become light in the proportion that you find light in them.”

Part One was sprinkled with juicy quotes on the importance of reading and required little exertion on my part. In Part Two Adler gives three steps for getting the most out of what you read. Keep in mind that his emphasis is on classic non-fiction, called the “Great Books” because they contain the important ideas that have been a part of the human conversation since the beginning of written language. Plato, the Bible, Aquinas, Darwin and Newton are a few examples of “must-read” works. A limited amount of fiction works are included such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Melville and Dickens.

The second and third parts of the book are heavy and didactic, but I kept reading out of sheer stubbornness. If you’ve read my profile you know I consider myself somewhat of a book snob, but to Adler I’m a total amateur. According to him any baby can read for pleasure, but someone who reads to learn and be changed will have to pay a much higher price. Of the 131 important books listed in the 1939 edition I’ve read only six! Adler wrote that he put the list in the book reluctantly because too often students read through it and consider themselves “educated”. He emphasizes that it would be better to read a few of these books well rather than all of them poorly. Although I wasn’t completely converted from classic fiction to the “Great Books” list I have decided to occasionally branch out from my usual fare. I’ve even marked six titles to add to my reading list over the next two years. Hopefully Adler would approve.

Two notes of interest: First, Adler’s emphasis on paying attention to repeated words and phrases seems elementary to the experienced reader, but I can tell you that that particular method of “deeper” reading (sometimes called inductive study) became life-changing to me as I learned to read the Bible that way. Second, I found a slightly updated version of the "Great Books" and was thrilled to see my two favorite authors (Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Brontë) included this time around. One list is here.