you leave me broken, shattered i lie...
As I watched Troy last night, I came upon an epiphany of sorts. I was thinking of the great impact of Homer's The Iliad, and started pondering what the four or five greatest books of all time would be. Here I now present the only books that can properly be called "essential" to any bookshelf (ordered chronologically):
1. The Iliad and The Odyssey. Nobility, heroism, honor, glory, vitality: these primordial, archetypical values remain transcendent today.
2. The Complete Works of Plato. Philosophy is invented, and its name is Socrates.
3. The Bible. The birth of modern ethics.
4. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. So this is what it means to be human!
5. The Portable Nietzsche. Plato and God meet their match.
8 Comments:
Yeah but that's not fair because they're all compilations. I'm having a really tough time trying to think of what the most essential single books would be though. And this doesn't mean I don't completely agree with you about Shakespeare, the Bible and the Iliad (re-reading it right now, good s*it)... I'd have The Lord of the Rings trilogy instead of the Odyssey, though...
For my list of the top individual books, go here:
http://www.unfashionableobservations.com/2003/11/i-know-where-beauty-lives.html
-Mr. X
Me again. I saw Troy last week. I didn't really like it (Menelaus' death?? etc), but it blew my mind because some of the casting was so successful that Odysseus and Hector and his son and Andromache have faces so I have more emotional connection to the Iliad.
Ulysses is a lot deeper than the Odyssey. It's impossible to understand thoungh...
The Andy
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