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War typically trashes the dreams of young men and women. It trashes their bloodline, it more often than not trashes their marriage (their conjugal dream) and even their chance to mother or father together. It trashes everything that is so special and sacred about being a human being. It often separates a person from their soul, even from their own bodies. It can even create a schism in their psyche which is extremely hard to heal.
I guess, as I pass through my seventh decade, I'm not done with Homer and his influence on me. I hate that The Iliad glorifies war, focusing on the inflated egos of heroes and the gods who prop them up and their lovers and their splashy triumphs and pride but I love how it shows how wars can be fought over something as petty as a love-triangle. And then Odysseus takes 20 years to get back home (where the love fire is still flickering), having given up the best years of his life away from his wife and son, for what? He might as well have been lying comatose on their bed having archetypal dreams of fighting one-eyed giants and falling under the spell of sorceresses, which had nothing to do with his real life in Ithaca, for all his adventures boil down to an incredible self-centered tale of a clever but slow-learning violent man, relative to the reality of Penelope and Telemachus . . . How long they waited for him while things were unraveling on the homefront! Troy was nothing but a giant waste of testosterone, a bombastic tale to stoke young egos and sooth old soldiers.
(Article changed on Aug 10, 2026 at 8:14 AM EDT)
