the vale of

read the rest at Soul-Making!

crazy that the iconic bed scene isn't included!!

But Nolan’s “real” world omits some of the humor and the whimsy and the poignancy and the strangeness of the poem, those things that distinguish it from the war-whirl of the Iliad, and in doing so omits some of the epic’s most vivid scenes. ... Many of the details I missed—the conversations between Athena and her father Zeus, the “Nobody” joke, the olive-tree bed, the way Athena scolds the princess Nausicaa for her slovenliness so the girl will go to a stream and discover Odysseus, the sarcasm of Eumaeus, the dream of Penelope, the omens of birds, Menelaus’ attempts to capture the ever-changing Old Man of the Sea Proteus, the tender way a servant helps the blind poet Demodocus reach for his lyre, the part of Tiresias’ prophecy about the people who live so far inland they’ll mistake an oar for a winnowing shovel, the twitching legs of the 12 slave girls hung from the rafters for disloyalty—all this may not amount to very much. But all this is poetry.