Why I Like the Iliad

Glorious, epic, vast and complex are some of the words commonly used to describe Homer’s iliad but honestly, despite all the gods flying around in chariots, the near invincible heroes and the giant, battles on sprawling battle fields, the iliad is not a big story. Infact if you put it into perspective historically and geographically iys a very VERY small story but that isn’t what I mean. I mean that what makes it truly amazing is not that it tells of one immense mythological  tale, but rather, is a collage of very small very human stories.

While its incredibly frustrating to keep track of the 600+ names in the iliad, I love that homer names each and every character, giving them a name and identity even if just to identify them as they’re killed. He seems determined not to drown all those very human soldiers of his in one large death toll statistic. If someone dies in the Iliad, homer doesn’t let them die a nameless soldier, lost to the sweeping devastation of war. He makes sure you know the soldiers name or sometimes even where he’s from and what his ancestry is. It’s a valiant attempt at humanizing those that participate in larger-than-life events like the Trojan war that are romanticised and blown so out of proportion that its easy to forget that huge conflicts and great battles usually boil down to small actions by individuals and little interactions and fights between individual soldiers. In the Iliad, war is one man killing/maiming/hurting another. He doesn’t describe large trends or movements. Just individuals and their actions. Homer destroys the idea of a war being between large entities. When you say “India fought Britain” you’re talking about entities/concepts. Not people. Homer admirably avoids this and I love that.

There’s also the matter of little incidents and anecdotes within the battles and the framework of the larger story itself. Like the one where Diomedes, charging through battle leaving a trail of dead Trojans everywhere he goes, meets a Trojan (Glaukas) who’s grandfather happened to be a friend of Diomedes’ own. He insists they part friends, exchange gifts and avoid killing each other. For most of the book, Achilles is sitting out the battle and Hector appears to be commanding forces away from where homer wants our attention. So although it is the story of a few chosen famous “Heroes”, we see more of characters like Teucer of the arrows, poor Sarpedon, pushed about by the Gods’ whims and fancies. Or Glaukas, so ashamed at being wounded that he jumps off a wall or Pandarus who breaks the temporary truce between the Trojans and Greeks.

 As you plod through the Iliad,  Trojan war looks less like an intimidating old epic and more like a collage of very human stories and that B, is why I think its awesome.

Sorry this is basically the same sentence over again for 500 words. 

Thinking About: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It's been a few weeks since I finished Marquez’s Nobel Prize winning work, and often find myself drawing parallels with some of the author’s musings and my own life, wherein his words are able to better articulate my own thoughts – that’s how you know it’s good.

100 Years of Solitude is such a vast tapestry of the human experience, that every reader of the novel can reasonably draw their own meaning from it. To me, it reveals a great paradox of Marquez’s conception: the communicative power of mutual silence, the empathetic connection of shared solitude.

Throughout the story, following the lives of multiple characters and their interactions, this theme runs constant – there is a self hidden from all other individuals, one whose trials cannot be communicated and which no one can understand, because every outsider interprets them according to their own nature and experience. This is a distance shared by all, and its acknowledgement, instead of causing people to withdraw further into themselves, provides one of the most intimate connections humans can share, a mutual understanding of, and respect for, each other’s indiscernible private experiences.

It is a realization that, if accepted, brings people closer rather than distancing them, as it is perhaps the most reliable insight one can have into another’s thoughts.

The book explores countless other themes, of which one of my favorites is the layered and circumstantial representation of emotion, how experience enables one to grow out of some sentiments, and into others, as in comparison to certain feelings, others, previously all-consuming, appear almost trivial. A line that encapsulates this perfectly follows the final thoughts of colonel Aureliano Buendia, before he is shot by a firing squad, “it was in that moment that he realized how much he actually loved all the people he had hated”.

100 Years of Solitude has the ability to bridge that gap between the mundane and the grandiose, to reveal the enormity of the most minute occurrences, to illustrate the grand fabric of human existence embedded in circadian experiences.

-  Slop