Word: iliad
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Robert Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, who believes that a right good education can be packed into less than a five-foot shelf, picked the world's "ten greatest books" for readers of the Chicago Daily News. His list: Homer's Iliad & Odyssey, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics & Politics, Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, St. Augustine's City of God, Aquinas' Treatise on God & Treatise on Man, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Works, Pascal's Meditations, Tolstoy's War & Peace. He did not list the Bible...
...obscure leftist monthly (Politics) has appeared, in the guise of a study of the Iliad, a writing of remarkable spiritual resonance. It was written in France during the Nazi occupation. Its author: a French woman, Simone Weil, who died (1943) at 34. Its title: The Iliad, or The Poem of Force...
...force was nothing new. But what the 20th Century contributed was a growing belief in force as a beneficent factor in human progress. This was the 20th Century's specific heresy. This heresy is the background against which Simone Weil wrote The Iliad, or The Poem of Force...
Says Simone Weil: "The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits...
...anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing...