“I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive.”

‘There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.’

“In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness - from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis”

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalisations, prejudices in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking process attempts to organise this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organising our life. This false map is not repressed. What is repressed is the knowledge of reality, the knowledge of what is true. If we ask, then: What is unconscious? The answer must be: Aside from irrational passions, almost the whole of knowledge of reality. The unconscious is basically determined by society, which produces irrational passions and provides its members with various kinds of fiction and thus forces the truth to become the prisoner of the alleged rationality.

Fun Fact from The Iliad: The phrase “to eat a man raw” is a very particular phrase reserved just for the gods, as only the divine are exempt from the culture-defining restrictions of human society (ie cannibalism, incest)

Ok,  but this conclusion is not just from the Song of Achilles. This is in fact the conclusion that we as readers are supposed to come up with as we read the Iliad. What is more, the Song of Achilles merely misquotes an actual line that Achilles says to Hector before killing him: “I wish only that my spirit and fury would drive me to hack your meat away and it raw for the things that you have done to me.” (Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer, book 22 lines 341-343). But even without this line, even without the promise of actually eating human flesh, the Iliad does a very good job of showing the reader that Achilles has lost his humanity due to grief.