The Lost Books of the Odyssey
I began reading Homer last November, prompted by a
nagging sense of obligation, and encouraged by the delusion that I would
actually finish at least the Iliad before our trip to Turkey last December.
It’s now April, and I have just turned the final page.
I hesitate however to say that I have actually
read the books. Easily bored and possessing the attention span of a humming
bird, I found that large sections were simply beyond my reach. So each time my
nodding head banged against the table, I’d simply move on to the next chapter.
But I soon came to realize that this is a very
different book from the one that I didn’t actually read 40 years ago. The words are the
same but everything else about it has changed. I soon found myself reading and
re-reading chapter after chapter, verse after verse, even going back to those
sections that I’d skipped. It took almost six months, the entire living room
and half the dining area to accomplish this. Flurries of pink and yellow sticky
notes covered cabinets and furniture and the dog-eared and book-marked pages of
Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Bullfinch’s Mythology in an attempt to sort out and
understand the extraordinary perceptions on human existence that Homer
uncannily elucidates as well as what Homer’s audience knew and took for granted
everyday about the forces that shaped their lives and the world in which they
lived.
I think we’re missing something - this intimate
familiarity with gods and heroes. Their place in the lives of mortals provides
structure and guidance, perspective and strength to our daily existence. We no
longer walk with gods, nor they with us (with the exception of a few
Republicans of course), nor do we engage in public discourse with them. But we ignore them at our own peril.
As children of Abraham we’ve turned our backs,
discarded and collectively scoffed at this pantheon of gods, fashioning instead
the notion of monotheism. But once these multiple divinities are discarded
along with their rivalries, their jealousies, fears, and petty schemes we
separate ourselves from the divine and we fail to recognize the divine within
our daily lives and the divine within ourselves. We are reduced to just Heaven
and Earth - eternally separate. I think sometimes we are simply inadequate to
the task of understanding the divine. By our nature we can barely understand
ourselves.
Now that I’ve read this stuff of course, my view
of the world is forever tainted. Has the Washington Press Corp misreported the
facts or has Eris (Discord) once again appeared uninvited at a State Dinner at
the White House? Are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi actually running out of
meaningless gestures to parade endlessly across the Capitol and in serious
danger of actually having to accomplish something, or are Apollo and Athena
once again squabbling and using the pair as playthings in yet another Olympian
version of ‘As the World Turns’? Might we be less rancorous in our public
discourse if the antics of Sarah Palin and Glen Beck were accepted more as
immutable destiny (fate) and the convoluted alliances of the gods rather than
purely as ill intent? Or on a more
intimate note; Have I personally done something to fall from the good graces of
Mnemosyne? Would I remember if I had?
Homer’s stories are of course extraordinary. More
so the older I get. But if I expected these pages to somehow provide a key to
my understanding of my father, a classics scholar who would quote Homer at breakfast, Cicero at dinner, and Dante Alighieri each evening, what I found was something else. I did seem to stumble
occasionally upon dusty bits and pieces of the road on which he must have
traveled; I seemed to recognize a few signposts, places that he’d been, places
that he’d talked about, the literary equivalent perhaps of his wonderful yet
grainy, discolored, and faded 16mm movies of the Appian Way. It’s interesting
that his words, spoken so many years ago have in the end guided me to
extraordinary places that I would never have found on my own. What I found, as
I should have expected, was a clearer picture of myself, rather than of him.
