The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Strangely enough, when you actually start to read the Iliad the lens of this diminishing glass changes and becomes a mag- nifier. The scale of the war becomes unimportant; the scale of the men and the gods enlarges. The essential quality of the Iliad is nobility. Nobility is a virtue connected with magnitude; there are no small nobilities. General Eisenhowers Crusade in Europe was a useful book, portraying the largest single military and naval exploit in ali history. Yet, compared with the Iliad recounting a local struggle of little historical importance, it lacks magnitude. This is no reproach to General Eisenhower. He was no Homer.

And there never has been another Homer. If a reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey does nothing else for us, it makes us reflect on the difference between art and science. There has been "progress" in the latter; there is none in the former. Ali imaginative artists, but only if they are great enough, seem contemporaries. That is the way to read them.

C.F.

MOMER

ca. 800 B.C.E. The Odyssey

The Odyssey is a kind of sequei to the Iliad. It tells what hap- pened to the Greek heroes after the sack of Troy. More espe- cially it follows the fortunes of one of them: Odysseus, King of Ithaca, also known as Ulysses. It describes what happened to him during his ten years' long voyage home; the search of his son Telemachus for his father—a theme repeated in hundreds of novйis since, such as Joyce's Ulysses [110]; the arrogant woo- ing by the suitors of his patient wife, Penelope, during his absence; Odysseus's return; and his bloody revenge on his ene- mies. The story is well known even to those who have never read it. Like the Bible, it is less a book than part of the perma- nent furniture of our minds.

When we take up the Odyssey after the Iliad we step into a different world. Even its sound is different. That of the Iliad is clangorous with the clash of arms; that of the Odyssey, mur- murous or thunderous with the myriad-mooded sea.

But the difference is more basic. The Iliad is tragic. It announces a theme repeated in Western literature ever since, and one that obsesses our own private minds: the limitations of even the noblest spirits in the face of a world seemingly gov- erned by unchangeable Fate. But the Odyssey is not tragic. It stresses not our limitations but our possibilities. Its theme is not courage in the face of death, but intelligence in the face of hardship. It announces another of the great themes: the power of intelligence, a theme to which we modems readily respond. Though Odysseus is brave enough, his heroism is of the mind. He is not outsized in passion, like Achilles, but of human dimensions, like us.

The tone of the Odyssey corresponds to this more homely conception of man. While full of fairy-tale episodes, it

impresses us as does a realistic novel; indeed it is the first of ali realistic novйis, as it is the first of adventure stories, and still perhaps the best.

It is in this spirit that we may read it today, as a narrative of adventures that happened to an unusual man whose mind never stopped working. The mood of the Odyssey is more relaxed than that of the Iliad. And so should ours be as we read it.

C.F.

4

CONFUCIUS

551-479 B.C.E. The Analects

For many people in the modern West, the most difficult step in reading and appreciating the Analects is to get beyond the stereotyped image of Confucius himself as a quaint oriental gentleman speaking in fortune-cookie aphorisms. His name was not Confucius, of course; that was bestowed on him by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, a time when, for Europeans, every respectable philosopher needed a Latin name. (Confucius is a Latinized form of ICung-fu-tzu [pinyin Kongfuzi]¹—meaning 'Great Master K'ung/)

His family name was K'ung, his personal name Ch'iu [Qiu]; he came from an old and respected family of the lower nobil- ity, the class that in the medieval West would be called knights or chevaliers. He grew up as an expert archer and charioteer, a man of vigorous action as well as exquisite manners. He lived in a time of great social and political change, when the old

There are two systems for spelling Chinese words in English in common use. I use the older Wade-Giles system in this book, because I think most American readers are more comfortable with it; but I also give the newer pinyin spelling in square brackets after the first use of each Chinese term. — J.S.M.