Southern Bookman

Blue heron sighting recalls memories of Thoreau

A young woman stood on the 1941 bridge over Nancy Creek, shooting video with her phone of the water below.

I hurried to the bridge and looked down to see a blue heron standing motionless in the shallow water near the bank.

For years, the strange beautiful birds came to the area, inspiring the name of the nearby Blue Heron Nature Center. But the herons had vanished in recent years.

The young woman pointed out a small hawk perched on a branch hanging over the creek beside the heron. Neither bird moved. I tried to imagine what communion they shared.

I was on my way to the supermarket. When I returned to the creek, my bag loaded with items, the woman had left, but the blue heron remained in its same spot, as did the hawk. I watched for a few moments. The heron lunged its head forward, and began wading. I assumed it had spied a fish or some other prey.

Years before, I'd observed a blue heron wading in a pond at the other end of the creek. Now, the pond is overgrown, turned into a meadow. Suddenly on that day long ago, the bird took flight, majestically spreading its wings as it rose into the sky.

I was reminded of Henry David Thoreau's account of seeing a flock of blue herons flying overhead while on a river journey with his brother, John. The two brothers were on the Merrimack River when summer turned into autumn overnight. Through the years as I've walked through our neighborhood, I've imagined Thoreau beside me.

The blue heron and thoughts of Thoreau led me to write the following poem, which I read at the opening of the Blue Heron Nature Center.  I was  a young man then. Commonweal, the national Catholic literary and political journal, published the poem, which I rewrote countless times. 

After Reading "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"

By Louis T. Mayeux

At the pond by the condominiums,
the great blue heron
stalks the shallow water,
slow, lugubrious dance
almost beautiful.
Head speared for fish,
disturbing his own reflection,
he hunts along the edges.

One day, he stood, perfectly still,
as if at prayer,
then broke and flew
toward his endless blue freedom.

A flock of them in flight
astonished Henry and his brother John
as they prepared the raft
for their journey home,
strange, fierce wind behind them,
world changed to autumn overnight.

"Now comes good sailing,"
Henry said, death near,
as his sister, Sophia, read to him
his own words about that morning.

France divisions return after Notre Dame Cathedral fire

The Notre Dame Cathedral fire united France and the world in grief for the 850-year-old monument at the heart of Paris.

That didn't last long. Donations by corporations and wealthy families to rebuild the cathedral quickly drew criticism from right and left.

The leader of the yellow vest protests that have shaken Emmanuel Macron's government sniffed that the families behind LVMH and L'Oreal would receive tax breaks, meaning the average French taxpayer would really pay for the rebuilding.

And Disney, which reaped enormous profits from a cartoon version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," pledged a relatively meager $5 million.

Even Macron's vow to rebuild the cathedral in five years brought discord. Experts said a restoration likely would take as long as 20 years. A debate stirred over whether the restoration should add modern construction materials or aim for an illusory historical authenticity, which the cathedral had already lost.

The fire was the result of a restoration project that was scheduled to take at least 15 years. The old cathedral, extensively refurbished in the 19th century, was falling apart, a project that didn't excite as much passion as the fire's reconstruction campaign, as Slate's Henry Grabar pointed out.

As the fire burned, I imagined Victor Hugo's Quasimodo clambering upon the ancient roof to put out the flames. Absent the noble lover of Esmeralda, the Parisian firefighters performed heroically.

The Wall Street Journal Thursday detailed how a decision to stop the fire from spreading to the cathedral's signature bell towers saved the structure from collapsing. The WSJ also reported how the firefighters used water from the Seine River, at reduced pressure, to limit the fire's damage.

Notre Dame's construction in the Middle Ages came from a society united by religion and shared artistic values. The fire recalled one of the great books on medieval society, and its veneration of the Virgin Mary, Henry Adams' "Mont St. Michel and Chartres."

Since the French Revolution, France has been a steadfastly secular nation. Outside of Notre Dame, Catholic Masses are sparsely attended. My daughter said that during a high school stay in France, she and a couple of elderly women were the only worshipers.

Yet, the country remains intensely Catholic by culture. The French personality, with its talent for abstract thought and literature, love of sensual pleasure, and old-world inefficiency, derives from long centuries of Catholic influence.

Now, Western Europe is riven by social conflict, unable to reach agreement on whether Notre Dame should be rebuilt. Someone pointed out that the "forest" of ancient timber that fueled the fire can't be replaced; France no longer has a sufficient number of mature oak trees. In the past, ancient cathedrals ruined by fire have been rebuilt with modern construction methods, without loss of their authenticity.

While France's social divisions quickly split apart, the Notre Dame fire's aftermath brought a heart-warming show of unity in a leap in donations for three black churches in rural Louisiana burned by an accused arsonist. The Baptist churches in St. Landry Parish, in the heart of French Louisiana, received $1.8 million in donations.

France sees Notre Dame as the symbol of its historic greatness, which Macron wishes to restore. Now France must summon a unified will to rebuild Notre Dame.

 

 

 

A round of applause for Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot is having a moment in the literary world.

The 18th century theorist of the French Enlightenment is the subject of two new biographies, "Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely," by Andrew S. Curran (Other Press), and "Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher and the Fate of the Enlightenment," by Robert Zaretsky (Harvard University Press).

In recent weeks, positive reviews of the books have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New Republic and the New Yorker.

Diderot, a free-thinker, pornographer, journalist, sexual libertine and encyclopedia editor, enjoyed chatting about ideas with his longtime friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Paris coffee houses. The hero of rational thought suffered for his ideas; his writings against religion and the Catholic church landed him in prison. Another leading figure of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, wrote letters that led to Diderot's release. He continued speaking out against the state and church's repression.

Not as much of an original thinker as Rousseau and Voltaire, Diderot was a synthesizer of ideas.  Diderot was famous for co-editing the mammoth Encyclopédie, a compendium of the era's knowledge. The work ran to 24 volumes, 72,000 articles and 3,000 illustrations. The best-seller allowed Diderot to escape his fraught freelance existence. Curran in his book looks at Diderot's influence in the development of scientific thought.

As an author, Diderot is mainly remembered for his philosophical treatise "Rambeau's Nephew," a dialogue about ideas, the freedom of thought, and human relationships. He also wrote a pornographic work narrated by women's sexual organs.

Toward the end of his eventful life, he served as an adviser to Russia's Catherine the Great.  Zaretsky examines how Diderot in the end failed to get Catherine to accept his ideas of enlightened rule. While keeping her iron control over the vast country, Catherine purchased Diderot's library and gave him a generous financial endowment.

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik points out in his review that the Enlightenment's beneficial reputation has been tarnished. Revisionist historians now blame the movement for leading to totalitarianism and social control. In France, the Enlightenment was followed by the French Revolution and Napoleon's rule.

Diderot in the recent reviews is seen as a charming, colorful figure and a pioneer of social freedom. He was apparently an amorous adventurer rivaling Don Juan, and a tireless foe of oppression.

As the Western alliance fractures and truth is disparaged, it's heartening that Diderot's free-spirited life still receives homage.

 

 

Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark in 1978 New England Review interview anticipated today's cultural and social crises

Novelist, poet and literary theorist Robert Penn Warren and his wife, the writer Eleanor Clark, shared a wonderful life of writing, family, travel and simple rural pleasures.

Proud of his Southern heritage although raised in the border state of Kentucky, Warren contributed to the New Agrarian manifesto "I'll Take My Stand," then moved away from the group's intense regional conservatism, or, as their critics claimed, reactionary Confederate romanticism.

In contrast, Clark was proud of her Connecticut Yankee heritage. Part of the radical leftist Partisan Review crowd in her youth, Clark also grew away from her early solipistic theories.

While they came from different worlds, the couple both grew up in small towns, surrounded by older storytellers who presented them their recollections of a vanished 19th century America.

Finding happiness as writers working from their homes in rural Connecticut and Vermont, and raising two children, the sculptor Gabriel Warren and the poet and essayist Rosanna Warren, Warren and Clark enjoyed a successful marriage built on trust and affection, along with sparks of conflict.

Fond of travel to Europe, and steeped in history - one of Clark's masterpieces is the non-fiction "Rome and a Villa" - the couple in their gracious rural lives of reading, writing and reflection blended Old World values with those of American democracy.

Steve Oney as a 25-year-old working for the old Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday magazine visited Warren and Clark at their home in rural Vermont and wrote a vivid portrait of them and their warm, humor-tinged marriage. The 1979 profile is included in Oney's outstanding collection "A Man's World."

In his introduction to the 2017 book, Oney recalls that Warren gave him a  lifelong credo: "It may be said that our lives are our supreme fiction."

(Here is a Southern Bookman interview with Oney after the publication of "A Man's World" by Mercer University Press.  

And here is a Southern Bookman interview with Warren and Clark's daughter, Rosanna.)

Warren and Clark also come alive in critic and writer Jay Parini 's 1978 interview with the couple for one of the first issues of the New England Review, now celebrating its 40th anniversary. A co-founder of the literary journal, Parini, the biographer of Robert Frost, visited Warren, Clark and family along with Syndey Lea and Robin Barone.

The interview shows Warren and Clark's affection, humor and subtle rivalry with each other. As with Oney's piece, the reader feels as if he or she is participating in the visit. 

Clark and Warren's concerns about art, culture and the loss of individuality and community remain pressing today. Such civilized reflection seems in short supply, unfortunately.

 

Paul McCartney comes home to Liverpool in appearance on James Corden's Carpool Karaoke

Something has to be pretty special to receive accolades from Jesuit philosopher James Martin and sportswriter Woody Paige.

Paul McCartney's Carpool Karaoke appearance with Late Night host James Corden stirred Martin and Paige, along with thousands of YouTube viewers.

Martin praised the video in his column in the Jesuit magazine America, and Paige in his closing comments on ESPN's "Around the Horn" acclaimed McCarney's performance of Beatles classics with Corden.

In the video, McCartney and Corden ride through McCartney's hometown of Liverpool. McCartney points out places from his childhood, like the church were he sang in the choir and another one where his brother was married.

They go to Penny Lane and sites evoked in the famous song, and make a surprise visit to the rowhouse where McCartney lived with his family until his early fame with the Beatles and where he wrote his first songs with John Lennon.

The warmth shared by McCartney and his Liverpool fans shines with grace, as Martin says. A man tells McCartney his songs were played at his brother's funeral.

Despite his talent and years of fame, McCartney remains one of them.

 

 

 

Mathias Énard's "Compass" an intellectually challenging, emotionally enriching novel

Mathias Énard's "Compass" traces the interior journey of aging Viennese musicologist Franz Ritter during a long, sleepless night.

Recently diagnosed with a serious disease, or perhaps it's his hypochondria, Ritter spends the hours thinking about the connections between Western culture and the Mideast.

He's obsessed with European concepts of "the other" and "alterity." This leads him into imagined conversations with Thomas Mann, Wagner, and Edward Said. 

Ritter's sardonic doctor, who sounds like a holdover from the Third Reich, has refused to give Ritter a prescription for his beloved opium. Guess there's no Ambien in Vienna. 

During the slow progression toward sunrise, Ritter uncovers the contributions made by Persian and Arabic composers, writers and artists to Western art, literature and music. Ritter with his encyclopedic knowledge expresses belief in a unified human civilization.

While Ritter's dazzling intellectual flights give a challenging education in European and Islamic culture, the novel's essential beauty comes from his recollections of journeys to Mideastern places.

Énard's language, translated by American Charlotte Mandell, poignantly evokes a tolerant, sophisticated culture destroyed in recent decades by warfare and Islamic fundamentalism. 

Ritter's recollections of travels with a European coterie of "Orientalists" reveal a cosmopolitan world of conversation, music, food and love. He recalls the grace and richness of Aleppo, recently devastated by the Syrian civil war, and a visit to the ancient ruins of Palmyra, destroyed by Isis before the Sunni group's defeat. Istanbul and Tehran also glow in beauty and sensual pleasures before the rise of repressive Islamic leaders.

The book's most heartbreaking sequence describes how the Iranian revolution's promise of democracy and freedom after the shah's downfall was thwarted by the Ayatollah Khomeni's reactionary regime.

While Ritter's cultural digressions resemble an intellectual treatise, "Compass" dazzles as a novel brimming with fully imagined set pieces and memorable secondary characters. 

The primary unifying story comes from Ritter's lamentations about his lost love for a beguiling woman named Sarah, also an academic excited by connections among different cultures. As the night stretches on, Ritter muses over his failed relationship with her. A spiritual searcher, Sarah has left her home in Paris to explore primitive cultures in Malaysia after a period seeking Buddhist enlightenment.

Ritter recalls a series of interactions with Sarah through the years, ranging from Mideastern excursions and academic conferences to her romantically thwarted visits to Vienna. The relationship between them ranges from romantic tenderness to the excitement of shared ideas  to slapstick comedy. With all of his erudition and cultural perceptiveness, Franz is amazingly obtuse about Sarah. The novel closes on a beautiful, ambiguous interchange between the two, showing that love letters will maintain their power in the age of email.

Edward Said's influential treatise "Orientalism" is a touchstone of "Compass." The storytelling structure of "A Thousand and One Nights" is another talisman, along with Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Ritter's voice also recalls that of Camus' solitary first-person narrator in "The Fall."

While questions of accuracy recently rose in Deborah Smith's translation of South Korean novelist Han Kong's "The Vegetarian," Mandell rendered Énard's original French with exactitude and artistic brilliance. Énard's long, meandering sentences register in English with the exquisite beauty of their original language. A description of Istanbul's waterfront as seen through a window during an early evening gathering combined poetic musicality with visual precision.

Énard's demands on the reader are rewarded with aesthetic power and intellectual enrichment. Moments of hope and beauty break through clouds of despair and sorrow. Flashes of black-tinged humor lighten the mood. While I at times felt disoriented as if lost in a labyrinth, Énard's compass had a true direction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

moments of hope and beauty breaking through clouds of despair and sorrow. While I at times felt disoriented as if lost in a labyrinth,

Three poems for a frozen day

On a frozen day, the ground covered with snow, here's three winter-related poems.

The first, "The Snow Man," shows Wallace Stevens' metaphysical imagination. The simple words of a winter landscape Stevens fashions into an illusive search for meaning.

The second, is a William Shakespeare song that I've always liked, imagining Greasy Joan and a merry Elizabethan snow day.

The third, W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B Yeats," always seems relevant, especially in these times.

The Snow Man

By Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter 

To regard the frost and the boughs 

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; 

And have been cold a long time 

To behold the junipers shagged with ice, 

The spruces rough in the distant glitter 

Of the January sun; and not to think 

Of any misery in the sound of the wind, 

In the sound of a few leaves, 

Which is the sound of the land 

Full of the same wind 

That is blowing in the same bare place 

For the listener, who listens in the snow, 

And, nothing himself, beholds 

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

 

Winter 

By William Shakespeare

WHEN icicles hang by the wall

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,

Then nightly sings the staring owl,

                Tu-whit;

Tu-who, a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow

 And coughing drowns the parson’s saw

And birds sit brooding in the snow

 And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl,

                Tu-whit;

Tu-who, a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

 

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

By W.H  Auden

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness

The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,

The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,

To find his happiness in another kind of wood

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

With your unconstraining voice

Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise

Thinking about Henry David Thoreau on his 200th birthday

The modern media make a fetish of historic anniversaries and famous people's birthdays.

Today, Henry David Thoreau, born 200 years ago, receives the treatment. Op-ed pieces on the theme of Thoreau's relevance today. Satiric sallies playing off the writer's alleged misanthropic personality. Looks at how his philosophy fits with today's political climate.

Recently, Shakespeare, Martin Luther, World War I and the Battle of Waterloo generated great date frenzies. This might focus attention on important people and events, yet throws them into the daily rush of celebrity sensation and media trivia. 

Hey, I'm doing it too. 

Many hate Thoreau after being forced to read his "Walden: A Life in the Woods" in high school. It's a difficult book. The spate of attention and variety of opinions about his work show that he's a writer who says different things to different readers.

Others love him, seeing him as the father of civil disobedience, the environmental movement and individualism. 

While I've struggled with Henry David, I count myself among this camp. Visiting the reported site of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond near Concord, Mass., was one of my life's great moments. Viewing the mysterious dark Walden, filled with happy summertime swimmers, also filled me with wonder.

I need to return to the book. Along with reading parts of "Walden" in high school and college, I listened to it on the now outmoded Walkman in my days running around the track at Oglethorpe University here in Atlanta. The audiotape reader's odd, hectoring voice put me off, although I was transported by Thoreau's words. Now, I want to revisit the work, give Thoreau's disturbing ideas deeper contemplation.

My favorite Thoreau book is "A Walk on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," an account of his raft trip with his brother, John, from Massachusetts to Maine and back. He wrote the book during his stay at the Walden cabin. His account of rushing along the rivers, the wildlife and natural terrain is among the greatest American writing. Soon after their return to Concord, his brother John died from tetanus after receiving  a minor cut. 

I also love Thoreau's recently published journals and his observations of Massachusetts flora and fauna. Like Benjamin Franklin, he made major contributions to scientific knowledge.

Every time I walk in my neighborhood, blessed with trees, wild areas, ponds and creeks in the middle of a major American city, I think about Thoreau, as if he's walking beside me. His philosophy of global awareness and local action I aspire to follow.

 

 

Now let us praise Diana Trilling

Will Diana Trilling now have her moment of rediscovery?

Overshadowed by her husband, the major American critic Lionel Trilling, during their long marriage, Diana also achieved a notable literary career as a book critic and political and cultural essayist.

Outliving Lionel by 17 years, she in her 70s turned to journalism, writing a bestselling book about the murder trial of Jean Harris, who killed her estranged lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the cardiologist who invented the Scarsdale diet. Expertly fashioning the techniques of new journalism, Diana  wrote a classic of crime and trial reporting.

Like Lionel an inside member of New York's left-wing intellectual community centered around magazines such as the Nation, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Partisan Review, Diana also wrote the well-regarded memoir "The Beginning of the Journey," an account of her troubled marriage.

Now, 21 years after her death, Diana is the subject of a biography, "The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling," written by a close friend, Natalie Robins. Writer Tobi Haslett wrote a mixed review of the book in The New Yorker, finding that Robins didn't engage fully with Diana's ideas. The photo of Lionel and Diana above comes from the New Yorker web site.

The famed critic and Columbia University professor Lionel Trilling was plagued by frustration: He longed for success as a novelist. His one novel, "The Middle of the Journey," - the journey motif keeps returning in Diana's memoir, his novel and Robins' biography - was unsuccessful, although the book has received positive re-evaluations since his death.

According to Robins, Lionel's rages damaged their marriage. Not as knowledgeable as Lionel when they married, Diana with her art-history degree from Radcliffe was a major editor of Lionel's work, guiding him from ponderous academic writing and sharpening his arguments.

Turning against the Partisan Review's Marxist politics, Lionel and Diana expressed a staunch anti-communism. Nor was Diana much taken by radical feminism or the New Left counterculture of the 1960s. She harshly condemned the student riots that brought severe damage to Lionel's beloved Columbia campus.

Diana's late work made its mark on the new journalism landscape. I particularly remember her account of the evening she and Lionel were invited to John F. Kennedy's White House for a dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners. That was the event after which Kennedy quipped that never had the presidency seen such a collection of intellects, except for when "Mr. Jefferson dined alone." Her descriptions of the glittering evening are among the best portraits of Kennedy's presidency.

Is a biography of Diana Trilling needed? With all of her productivity during her long life, she was a relatively minor figure in the New York intellectual community that thrived from the 1930s through the 1960s and beyond. Diana Trilling's life and work are worth revisiting; she registered enormous changes in American society from a dispassionate viewpoint. These days, America is bereft of such discerning thought.

 

 

 

 

Daniel Mendelsohn remembers how Homer's 'The Odyssey' brought him closer to his father

Daniel Mendelsohn's essay in the April 27 New Yorker about reaching a deeper relationship with his elderly father through their shared interest in "The Odyssey" gave poignant testimony to how classic literature can change our lives.

Jay Mendelsohn, a retired computer scientist, was 83 when he asked Daniel, a professor at Bard College, if he could monitor the freshman class Daniel teaches on Homer's epic poem about the Greek  hero Odysseus' 10 -year journey home from the Greeks' war against Troy. The elder Mendelsohn drove to Manhattan from his home in Long Island each week to attend the class.

The classroom study of "The Odyssey" led to the father and son taking a cruise that traced the sites of the Greek hero's voyage. The cruise leads to a stronger understanding between father and son.

Mendelsohn reaches higher acceptance of his father's rational mind, and the father better understands his son's artistic viewpoint. Jay Mendelsohn emerges as a wonderful literary character, witty, compassionate and insightful, qualities that Dan says he didn't often reveal to his family. The piece briefly touches upon his father's last painful days and death after suffering a massive stroke. 

I discovered from Mendelsohn's web site that the New Yorker essay is an excerpt from a memoir, "An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic," which will be published in September. National Public Radio recently did an interview with Mendelsohn, and put the photo above on its web site.

Mendelsohn's long been one of my favorite writers. I experience a jolt of anticipation whenever I see his name listed in the Table of Contents of the New Yorker or New York Review of Books. He's one of the few writers whose essays I'll reread in his books after enjoying them in a journal.

Not only does Mendelsohn excel at explaining classical literature and themes, he's also brings a different perspective in writing about pop culture. I especially remember his New York Review piece that dismantled the "Mad Men" hoopla.

He's also a translator from the Greek language, although I was disappointed with his rendering of Cavafy's "Collected Poems." His Cavafy poems lacked the sharpness and emotional weight of other translations.

Nevertheless, I'll look forward to reading more about his and his father's odyssey to greater love and understanding. The book will also teach valuable lessons about how classics like Homer's work can enrich modern life.