Mankind forgets

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Hey,

I’m reading The Odyssey. I’m almost halfway through it, and I want to finish it so I can go to the movie theater and watch Nolan’s movie.

Not that you need to read the original before you watch a film adaptation of anything. A poem is a poem, and a movie is a movie.

But I wanted to read it, mostly because Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a Spanish bestselling author, says you have to read the classics.

You may have never heard of him, but he’s a great writer. And if Pérez-Reverte says you gotta read the classics, I’m gonna read the classics.

And you gotta read them because, he says, mankind forgets. It’s all there, in the classics. The great disasters, the great challenges, the love, the misery, the glory. The best and the worst of all of us.

The scenes we play out in our lives, and the great scenes of history, have been played out on the stage of the world over and over again for the last 3,000 years, or more.

And though many of the world’s great tragedies are unavoidable, if you have read Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, or Dante, you can see them coming.

And to see them coming, that’s something, man.

So I want to watch The Odyssey, sure.

But more than that, I want to read it.

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PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips. A small tragedy played over and over again for 72 pages, for less than the price of a pizza.