Sartre said that humanity's problem is that we are not heavy enough for reality. Pain, guilt, persecution, these things break through the illusions of comfort and hope to expose the power of the naked will. But I wonder... What would you give if an angel came down from heaven this morning and told you the secret of life: that we are too heavy for true being; we must grow light again! Joy, Hope, Comfort, Love must break forth in a riotious torrent until we are more good than good and more real than real! We have become so heavy with our pain, our endless see-sawing between self exaltation and self flagelation that we have sunken straight through reality, as surely as Dante's hell stands at the center of the earth while his heavens encompass the cosmos. What if he told you that the ultimate reality was not the stillness of an abandoned cathedral but the laughter after the punchline of a truly good joke shared between old friends long parted? What if he declared with joy and certainty: I have come from being Himself and this is His offer "come and have life, and life over-flowing". Would you not fall down before such a liberator, would you not pay any ammount to hear those words and know them to be true?
Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
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