Without Homer, I'm really not sure what we'd do. In my own view he's a far, far more valuable figure for humanity's true understanding of itself than, say, Plato, or even than Jesus Christ, and certainly more than the hateful and brutally life-destructive Saint Paul, who gave us the so-called "Jesus Christ" that we now have and now live with.¹ These figures, including Jesus after his retooling by Paul, all function as naysayers toward life and thus as destroyers of it, serving instead as purveyors of the notion of life after life. In return for this desecration of life they get little but fame, praise, worship, and idolatry. On the other hand, Homer, the real and genuine life-affirmer, real life-embracer, and real life-celebrant—what he gets, at least in response to the Iliad, are slurs and contumely for being a primitive and uncivilized lover of gore, violence, ruin, and war.

I guess you can tell pretty easily where my own sympathies lie. To me, it's such a great pity that for most people Homer is boring. And to me, it's such a great pity that those relatively few who do read him are indoctrinated (yes, I could say "taught") to read him literally rather than psychologically and symbolically, and to read him on a superficial and near-literal level—a level that can lead only to a paucity of understanding and experience—rather than to read him on the breathtakingly deep level that the poet himself goes to, the level that can give those who go there with him experiences and questions that will remain with them for life—and that may even give them a sense of what it feels like not simply to be alive but actually to be civilized.

How can any of us be civilized, after all, if we know nothing of the darkness that's the opposite of that state, the state of being "civilized"? It's this exact thing that Homer does in the Iliad, with extraordinary courage, bravery, fortitude, perception, and sensitivity—he looks straight into the heart of the darkest, most complex, most difficult, most seemingly hopeless, and often the most terrifying elements and aspects of life as we are all destined—by the simple fact of birth—to live, survive, and endure it. And yet—and what a huge "yet" this is—he never, ever, descends to the level of the tragic, but he descends solely and only to the level of the true.

(pp. 119-120)