A father makes his son out of his flesh and out of his mind and then shaps him with his ambitions and dreams, with his cruelties and failures, too. But a son, although he is of his father, cannot know his father totally, because the father precedes him; his father has always already lived so much more than the son has, so that the son can never catch up, can never know everything. No wonder the Greeks thought that few sons are the equals of their fathers; that most fall short, all too few surpass them. It's not about value; it's about knowledge. The father knows the son whole, but the son can never know his father. (查看原文)
Homer's skillful manipulation of the parallel homecomings reminds us of a familiar psychological truth: that a strong sense of what our own family is like, what its weaknesses and strengths are, the relative degrees of its conventionality and eccentricity, its normalcy or pathology, is often impossible to establish until we are old enough to compare it intelligently with the families of others, something we start doing only when we begin to perceive, as happens at the end of childhood, that our family is not, in fact, the entire world. (查看原文)
this poem-within-a-poem parallels crucial elements of Odyssey itself: abuses of hospitality, anxiety about adultery, the superiority of cunning to brute strength, the satisfactions to be had from vengeance. The lay of Ares and Aphrodite is, therefore, an excellent example of how the Odyssey uses what may at first appear to be digressions, material that is extraneous to the plot, to underscore its most important themes. (查看原文)
He read to me the Odyssey in Greek! He spoke to me in Latin! Hewas reciting the Classics all the time, just to have the sound in my head. I should say that I understood a good bit, since I had been studying classical languages with him already for two years. And I think that hearing that sound, the sound of a human voice reciting poetry, helped me to heal. Yes, I do think that is true. So I feel in some way the Odyssey saved my life.
He paused for a moment and suddenly looked straight at me. And I can tell you that it sank in！
Then he opened his mouth and, in flawless, rhythmical Homeric Greek, began reciting Athena's speech to Zeus from Book 1 …… (查看原文)
The epic is so filled with stories, not least those told by its hero, tales both true and false, outright lies and "enhanced versions of things that really did happen,
everything that happens, it reminds us, can be a gripping story in the hands of the right storyteller. What is Odysseus, in the end-the hero whose final act of vengeful violence is compared, by means of another memorable simile, to a bard stringing his lyre-but the poet of his own life? We all need narrative to make sense of the world. (查看原文)
