I think if we have a quest narrative, whether it's in a poem, a novel, or a movie, we need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation. He needs to want something. So the fact that these desires seem to be stripped from Odysseus, he doesn't seem to want food, doesn't seem to want sex. What does he want?
Ego, pride, wrath, fear, gods, superheroes, mortals, and lots of killing. Welcome to Homer's Iliad, which reads at times like a script for a Tarantino film or the latest installment of the Avengers franchise.
When I um read Walden when I was a freshman in high school, I was just sort of like transcendentalism. This is like this is what I want wanted to do my whole life. I wanted to transcend how people see me because I was assigned male at birth and because I'm black and poor in the South. I want to transcend this body. I want to transcend like time and space. And I finally had a word um for what I longed to do and what I felt like I was here to do.
When that sentence comes into my life, whether I'm reading it to teach, whether I'm rereading it to write, whether I'm reading it out loud, even just now, tears always spring to my eyes.
Morrison is one of the incredible thinkers and theorists of racism as a pathology. And when she describes what it is to be racist, she's very insistent that this is a problem of the racist. This isn't actually a problem of the black person.
