sång och strid

“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”

“Reading, and sauntering, and lounging, and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme happiness.”

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

“There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.”

The beautiful word minunthadios, 'short-lived,' is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us. We die too soon, and there is no adequate recompense for the terrible, inevitable loss of life. Yet through poetry, the words, actions, and feelings of some long-ago brief lives may be remembered even three thousand years later.

I find it incredibly funny from a meta/author perspective, that Ancient Greece decided to name their protagonist that angers many people “Anger Bringer” but, even funnier, is the in universe understating that anyone who meets Odysseus must have had the thought “oh dear, how unfortunate to be named hateful/hated” and then they have exactly One conversation with him and go “Ah I see now”