The World Philosophy Group

Session #5 of 8
Now our group moves to the first sequel in the western epic poetry tradition: The Odyssey.

From Troy to Ithaca: What to Expect in Homer's Odyssey
If the Iliad is a war poem — driven by Achilles' rage, massed armies, and the grief of collective catastrophe — the Odyssey is its near-opposite: a homecoming story powered by cunning, survival, and the longing for family.

The hero changes everything. Achilles burns with transparent, volcanic emotion; Odysseus thinks, disguises, and endures. Where the Iliad is linear and concentrated around Troy, the Odyssey is episodic and wide-ranging — Cyclopes, enchantresses, the land of the dead — and more varied in tone, accommodating folktale, comedy, and domestic warmth alongside genuine danger.

The gods shift dramatically between the two poems. In the Iliad, the Olympians are boisterous and intensely present — taking wounds, quarreling, fighting alongside mortals on the battlefield. In the Odyssey, they pull back into something more like a moral framework. Athena guides and protects Odysseus from behind a series of disguises, while Poseidon's wrath drives the entire plot. The divine feels less chaotic and more purposeful — concerned with justice and the proper restoration of order.

Women play a far larger role. Penelope matches her husband in intelligence and resolve, and figures like Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa are among antiquity's most vivid female characters. The Iliad's world of women exists largely as what war destroys; the Odyssey makes the household itself the prize worth fighting for.

Most strikingly, the Odyssey quietly revises Iliadic values. When Odysseus visits the underworld, Achilles — who chose glory over long life — confesses he'd rather be a living slave than king among the dead.

New translation of Proust!
First-timer or experienced Proustian... Join us for the Proust Readers Support Group's sixth journey -since 2011- through the entire In Search of Lost Time (ISOLT) opus. This time we will be using the new translation (2023-28) published by Oxford World Classics (seven volumes). We also recommend Professor William C. Carter's Annotated ISOLT (Yale UP, six volumes) for background and context.

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu *[In Search of Lost Time,*1913-1927] represents the pinnacle of the modern psychological novel, offering a recursive exploration of consciousness that aligns with our Meetup’s commitment to advanced intellectual inquiry.

By undertaking this sequence, the group engages with a profound "evolution of ideas" concerning the fluidity of temporal perception and the architecture of the self.
In The Swann Way, the "Overture" establishes involuntary memory—exemplified by the iconic Madeleine—not merely as nostalgia, but as a phenomenological retrieval of the "total" past.

The volume’s bifurcated structure, transitioning from the pastoral childhood impressions of "Combray" to the sophisticated pathology of desire in "Swann in Love," provides a comparative study of how social artifice and internal obsession shape our ontological reality.

Proust’s prose, characterized by its labyrinthine syntax and Bergsonian treatment of duration, demands a slow, analytical pace. The work serves as a nuanced meditation on the "intermittencies of the heart" and the redemptive power of aesthetic experience to reclaim a life otherwise lost to the entropic flow of chronological time

Editions (available from your local library or online):