A pox on anyone who tries to extract a message from The Odyssey. It’s not that The Odyssey doesn’t mean anything. Quite the opposite. It’s just that a work of art isn’t like a fortune cookie which can be cracked open, its message to be plucked out and read aloud over dessert. Instead, a work of art is like a deep, active pond into which you can cast your line and draw up any number of things, depending on the season, the time of day, your skill as a fisherman, and your willingness to wait.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image: “Penelope” by TheoJunior via Flickr (Creative Commons)
I read The Odyssey a long time ago. In the past I went fishing with a deceased uncle.