Bookflix · Observations
Homer's Wine-Dark Sea
Everyone's buying the Odyssey again, so I reread it — and found I couldn't see it the way I did at seventeen. A short voyage into why the Greeks called the sea wine-dark and never once called it blue, what that has to do with the colors I've stopped noticing, and why the same books keep finding us at different tides.
Somewhere in Hollywood, Christopher Nolan pointed a very expensive camera at the Mediterranean, and now everyone I know is buying Homer. Bookshops can't keep him stocked. Three thousand years in print and the man is having a sales quarter. I find this genuinely staggering — that you can write a thing so well it keeps moving units across the fall of empires, the invention of the novel, and the entire history of publishing that came to bury you and instead kept you on the front table.
Some writers get a good week. Homer gets millennia.
Was I an exception? Of course not. We bought the handsome new edition, and now I read a canto or two most evenings, warming up for a film I still haven't seen. I almost typed no spoilers — but from where, exactly. The plot leaked in the eighth century BC.
And there it is, early and then again: the sea, wine-dark. Which I noticed because a year ago I wrote a little note about that exact phrase, back in our sea issue. So I went back and walked the shoreline of that old number again, and this is me reporting what washed up.
But first, a confession, because it colors everything that follows. I am not reading the Odyssey the way I read it at seventeen. Back then it was a voyage — monsters, wine, weather, a man too clever for his own good. Now I can't get the enchantment to hold. I keep seeing the people instead: the grind of their days, the arithmetic of every moral choice, the plain human weight of it, the kind of weight we all carry to work each morning without a single Cyclops in sight. I can't tell what to blame — the reality we've all washed up into these last few years, or the recent film, where Ralph Fiennes wears the entire journey in his face. Something in it made the spirit of that ancient story rhyme, a little too precisely, with the exact time and the exact place I happen to be living in.
At seventeen I read a hero coming home. Now I read a soldier coming home — which is a different book, though not one word of it has changed. A man who spent ten years learning to survive a war, and then could not put it down at the door; who reached the island he'd been rowing toward the whole poem and found the homecoming heavier than the sea. Fiennes wears that in his face — which makes me wonder what Matt Damon is going to do with his. I still haven't seen the film. I'm rationing the book first, the way you save the last of something good, and I'll walk into the cinema when Odysseus and I have both made it home.
Now, before you picture a man reading with his head bowed, resigned, muttering into his coffee about the futility of it all — no. I'm a cheerful sort, ask anyone. I simply decided that since I'd caught this particular mood, I'd carry it through the whole book on purpose, and look at everything through that one pane of glass and see what it did to the view.