Booktalk

If you think heart-rending loss, unchecked vengeance, nuanced sensitivity, and unassailable faith are antique emotions with no application to our current world, then I will leave you alone in your cave. Otherwise, I will urge you to wait no longer to read Virgil's Aeneid. I just finished the Robert Fagles translation. The surge of 10,000 lines of poetry is tireless.


I think the miracle of the telling is that it is so epic and intimate at the same time. I love the digressive metaphors that liken some circumstance in the story to some every-day experience that each of us knows. The horror of combat and the rage of battle are as authentic as those I read in the Matterhorn's chronicle of Vietnam battles.

Plus, I'm blown away by a story written two-thousand years ago: the ambition of it, the grace of it, the relevance of it. It has the original energy found only at the birth of an art-form; Keaton's film, Giotto's paintings.

Put it on you bucket list, but get to it.