We should learn to cultivate the unwillingness to tolerate the unwitting, untold lie in the soul, and the wit and wisdom to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance into the telling lies that reveal truth… The first lecture of the school year is, by an old tradition, dedicated to the freshmen among us. Whether [...]
There is Odysseus, a vivid, viable, versatile, multifarious man, the man by whose agency alone Achilles is admitted to blood and voice, the man who made the odyssey—a poet. And so it is shown that the “Odyssey,” a poem about a poet, is a work of reflection. 1. On Seeing Homer Epic is that kind [...]
The Iliad is Homer’s vehement attempt to reconcile god and man, clairvoyantly musing on how terrible and wonderful it would be if a man possessed a divine nature. As the heroes of The Iliad are slain in blood, Homer gives each of them an epitaph in poetry, that they may die not as expendable [...]
It is interesting that at least half the great books I considered for this list were stories I would not want to enter, but loved reading. Literature allows us to gain a breadth of experience our own circumstances would not permit and at very little expense to us… If there’s something book lovers like [...]
The “Odyssey” is a wondrous poem. Joe Sachs’ Afterword to his translation is a thought-inducing meditation on wonder, on Homer’s imaginatively and artfully conceived wonders and on Homer’s people, who are—above all, Odysseus—open to wondering and to its ensuing wisdom… the Odyssey by Homer, translated by Joe Sachs (Paul Dry Books: Philadelphia 2014) Joe Sachs’ [...]
Author's Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages had been given the gift, not only to peer into the twenty-first century, but to correspond with us who live in that most confusing and rudderless of centuries. Had it been in their power [...]
What is a Book? It is a special kind of body made to be inhabited by a curious kind of frozen but fusible soul, a body fit to mediate its own peculiar life… It is our tradition that the first lecture of the year should be dedicated to our freshmen.* They have newly joined a [...]
There is dignity and value in work. You who live in America once knew this. You did not think lesser of a man because he got his hands dirty with honest toil. To the contrary, you thought it a grand thing to build and to create. But all that has changed... Author’s Introduction: Imagine if [...]
I have read your books, and I have discovered that many of you believe that people are products of their environment. How can you believe such things, and yet deny altogether the influence of the past? Nature may give us robust health or leave us scarred, but her traces upon us are minor things compared [...]
Odysseus has the art we need. I think he came by it through a rare combination of acutely honed cleverness and deep-souled imagination; we can acquire it by education. This art, the art of discovering significance, is the art of interpretation... I am to write about my hero Odysseus and to connect him to Liberal [...]
The epithet “much-enduring” is often associated with moments when we see the interplay between Odysseus’ self-knowledge and his ability to use his experience to judge and adapt himself to circumstances; between his enduring self and purpose, and the many-ness of his schemes and courses of action... Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series [...]
Oh, dear sons of the twenty-first century, do not balk at those who call you to live up to your father’s reputation. Do not define yourself against him, as so many of your age have done. If you do, you will dash yourselves on the rocks and miss out on your greater calling... Author’s Introduction: [...]
Christians invented the classical curriculum; it is as much part of the broader Western inheritance as it is specifically part of the Christian inheritance… Why study old books? How do dusty old books written by dead men and women thousands of years ago grow my faith? Such can be common thoughts when the Christian [...]
You teach your students that the men of the past looked upon their wives as chattel, that they saw them as possessions rather than as people of value and worth. How deeply mistaken you are; how far from the truth... Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient [...]