Saturday, January 23, 2010
Homer and Melville
It just struck me as I was thinking about "The Iliad" in particular, that there are some significant common threads between it and Melville's "Moby Dick". Both can be thought of in terms of an internal struggle. Both works describe an adventure in which the central character is searching for something (or some things) which represents his own "internal demon(s)". For Captain Ahab, the whale represented some ultimate monster that he was maniacal in overcoming. The same might be said for Ulysses as he faced all kinds of maladies. In the case of Ulysses, there he and his men are on a wonderful island where they have need of nothing. Yet, he goes to the land of the Cyclopes, risking himself and his men. To quote Nietzsche in "Schopenhaur as Educator" (p 191 "Unmodern Observations"), "Why does the hero so passionately desire the opposite, namely to feel life, which is the same thing as suffering from life?"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
There's a really interesting book called Achilles in Vietnam that uses the Illiad to talk about post traumatic stress issues. Fascinating read.
ReplyDeleteDoug,
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting how often it seems that "internal demons" are the driving force behind our actions. What spurs the process of inquiry and the desire to discover is, more often than not, connected to something we care about. When it is a case of demons, I suppose motivations can become pathological, turning things into an occasion for our own suffering and that of those around us. This seems to be the case for Ulysses and Ahab, but what about Nietzsche?
It seems like he's talking about something else. Is he saying that to really be alive to things in our lives we have to suffer from them?
Just curious...
I wonder what Nietzche means