'There are two possibilities for human life. You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path...'
I had included The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson in last Wednesday's gallimaufry of books that don't get a longer blog post, before deciding to migrate it to a post of its own so that the comments (yours, because I'm hoping you will have some) will all be in one place where I can come back to them. The Port Eliot Helpers, now known as the BDW Chapter (Bloody Difficult Women) are convening here this weekend and I'll be gone a few days off on Adventures, so I'm leaving you home alone and hoping to come back to lots of help replies.
I really did mean to write more about The Mighty Dead backalong but tempus fugit since starting it in January and finishing it in March, besides which there is so much to say about it and, I must confess, some which I didn't really quite grasp. Some of the puffs suggest the book will 'cause you to see Homer afresh'...but what if you haven't really seen Homer in the first place.
I can't really carry on saying 'we never did it at school' even though we didn't. I vaguely remember Virgil's Aeneid but nil on Homer.
This all makes The Mighty Dead a book I will read again and alongside some Homer. There is a gaping hole in my knowledge here, it has always bothered me, and I felt it acutely as I read. I'm sure great nuggets of wisdom were sailing over my head, literally, because it's a book, at points various, that made me wish I sailed a boat, because I think therein lies so much deeper significance and understanding.
Anyway, this was all enough to prompt me to at least order the new translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, the first by a woman, and set it all aside for a Future Project. There were however so many moments of brilliance in Adam Nicolson's book that I now have a very defaced copy.
This for example...
'Human memory lasts only three generations at best, but the poem is more godlike than that. A poem is not an act of memory but of memorialisation, fixing into everlasting song what would otherwise be forgotten.'
I know a lot of you have read and recommended The Mighty Dead so I'm hoping you will help me out and share your thoughts in comments.
Meanwhile, is there anyone else out there who has the great big Homer gap too...
And for those who are best friends with Homer, is it really worth the effort (seems like sacrilege to even type that after reading this book).
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