Someone today will read Shakespeare’s hamlet and say omg he’s just like me fr. Another person will read moby dick and proclaim Ishmael as an adhd king.
A person grieving for their recently deceased lover reads the iliad and they watch as Achilles rages and rages and god how righteous anger fueld by love is so devastating that it’s ramifications still affect the world several thousand years later.
We might one day settle down and read the epic of gilgamesh and watch as a king has to accept the death of the person he loved the most. One of the very first stories ever written and it was about coping with death, and how to grieve.
We don’t read classics because they’re old, we read them because they remind us that we are never alone. That a character created over 500 years ago struggled with the exact same problems we all still have today. That even a king from centuries past had to deal with death just like me. That’s what makes stories so powerful–they prove to us that we are never truly alone in what we are feeling.
