BATTLE LINES

BATTLE LINES
by Daniel Mendelsohn


ABSTRACT: BOOK review of a new translation of the Iliad. For sheer weirdness, it would be hard to find a passage in the Western canon that can compete with the tenth book of Homer’s Iliad—the one classicists call the Doloneia. Readers of Stephen Mitchell’s fast-paced and very idiosyncratic new translation of the Iliad (Free Press; $35) will have to take my word on this, because Book 10 doesn’t appear in it. Mitchell’s is the first major English translation of the poem to implement the theories of the eminent British scholar M. L. West, stripping away what West argues are the impure, later additions to the original written text. Merely to claim that there was an original text of the Iliad is sensational stuff in the world of classics. Most ancient Greeks believed that there was a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems. In the eighteenth century, a French scholar discovered a manuscript of the Iliad from the tenth century A.D. that came complete with transcriptions from the marginal notes of ancient commentators. This discovery soon led the German scholar Friedrich August Wolf to argue that the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we possess had not been fixed in writing until relatively late. Mentions the Analysts. Early in the twentieth century, an American scholar named Milman Parry came up with an “oral theory” about how the lengthy poems were created and transmitted over the years. This is the orthodoxy that M. L. West has challenged. West’s controversial thesis is that there was in fact a Homer and that this poet actually wrote down a “primal text” of the Iliad, revising it over many years. However academic the debate may appear, a lot depends on who’s right. Perhaps because Mitchell is not a classicist, he is emboldened to cast West’s vision in stone. Mitchell’s Iliad is slimmer and leaner than anything we have seen before, the iambic line driving forward in a way that gives force to the English and nicely suggests the galloping dactyls of Homer’s lines. But too often his insistence on speed forces him to sacrifice nobility. Part of the way in which the epic legitimizes its ability to talk about so many levels of existence and so many kinds of experience is its style: an ancient authority inheres in that old-time diction, the plushly padded epithets and stately rhythms. All this, along with many other subtle effects, is gone from Mitchell’s Iliad, which, in its eagerness to reproduce what Homer says, strips away how he says it. The Iliad isn’t pure; its richness, even its stiffness, is part of what makes it large, makes it commanding, makes it great. It doesn’t need to be modernized, because the question it raises is a modern one: how do we fill our short lives with meaning?

ENGLISHING THE ILIAD: GRADING FOUR RIVAL TRANSLATIONS

ENGLISHING THE ILIAD: GRADING FOUR RIVAL TRANSLATIONS

Posted by Daniel Mendelsohn

This week in the magazine, Daniel Mendelsohn reviews a new version of Homer’s Iliad, translated by Stephen Mitchell. He also discusses the translation and his piece in this week’s Out Loud podcast.

A good way of getting a sense of the values and priorities of the Iliad’s many translators is to compare how they translate a given passage. The best showcases for these comparisons aren’t necessarily the poem’s “big moments” but smaller, more ordinary passages, such as the one I’ve chosen below, lines 795-800 from Book 13. This is one of the dozens of extended similes that Homer uses to convey how a given event looks and feels—in this instance comparing the massed ranks of Trojan troops preparing for battle to waves breaking on a shore during a wild storm at sea. A reasonably straightforward translation might look like this:

And they went in like a maelstrom of quarrelsome winds

that goes earthward beneath Father Zeus’ thunderbolt 

and with an inhuman din churns with the salt sea, the many

roiling waves of the greatly-roaring ocean

cresting, flecked with white, some before, and others hard behind;

So too the Trojans were packed together, some before, others hard behind.

But simply to convey what Homer’s words mean gives no sense of the real challenge that the translator faces, which is to think of ways to reproduce the wonderful sound effects Homer contrives here to evoke the sounds of the sea. Below is a line-by-line transliteration of the Greek text—with the stressed syllables in ALL CAPITALS—with translations of each word or phrase just beneath.

HOI d’isan AR-ga-le-OAN a-neh-MOAN ah-tah-LAHN-toy ah-EL-lay,

They went (of quarrelsome) (winds) (resembling) (a maelstrom)

HAY rha th’oo-POH BRON-TAYZ PAH-TROS Di-os AY-si peh-DON deh,

that beneath (the thunderbolt) (of Father) Zeus goes earthward

THEH-speh-see-OY d’oh-mah-DOY ha-li MIZ-geh-tai, EN deh teh POLL-ah

(with an inhuman) (din) (the salt sea) (churns), and many

KU-mahtah PAH-PHLAH-DZON-tah poh-LEE-PHLOYZ-BOY-oh thah-LASS-ays

Waves roiling (of the loudly-roaring) sea

KUHR-ta phah-LAY-ree-oh-OAN-tah, pro MEN T’AHLL’, OW-tahr ep’ ALL-ah:

Curved white-capped (in front) some, (but) (hard behind) others

HOSS TROE-EHS pro men ALL-oy ah-RAY-roh-tehz, OW-tahr ep’ ALL-oy

(just so) (the Trojans) (in front) some (were packed together) (but)( hard behind) (others)

Note, first of all, how the last words of the first, third, fifth, and sixth lines of this passage all end with the same sound combination, loaded with liquid “l”s (aellêi, “maelstrom”; polla, “many”: ep’ alla, “others hard behind,” ep’alloi, “others hard behind”): these liquid “l” sounds (with some explosive “p”s thrown in in the third, fifth, and sixth lines) beautifully evoke the sounds of the roiling waters, even as the insistent repetition of the “p-ll” sound cluster from line to line gives a sense of whitecaps breaking on the beach, one after another. (In other words, the near-rhyming words do what the waves do.) And, as if to make the analogy concrete, the sixth line—which reconnects the imagined world of the sea to the narrated world of the Trojans at war—repeats the “some before … others hard behind” language of the fifth: the waves are all’ … ep alla; the Trojans are alloi … ep’ alloi. So the sixth line is packed behind the fifth, imitating its sound cluster precisely the way in which the Trojan ranks, packed together in battle formation, are massed one behind the other.

Also of note is the way that the two adjectives in the fourth line—paphladzonta, the “roiling” waves, and polyphloisboio, the “greatly-roaring” sea—replicate each other’s consonants: the “p”s, the “ph”s, the “l”s, the soft “s”s and “z” sounds. If you repeat those languidly unspooling words, you’re making the noises of the surf.

With that in mind, let’s compare some notable translations of this vivid passage. Here is Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 rendering:

They went on, as out of the racking winds the stormblast

that underneath the thunderstroke of Zeus-Father drives downward

and with gigantic clamour hits the sea, and the numerous

boiling waves along the length of the roaring water

bend and whiten to foam in ranks, one upon another;

so the Trojans closing in ranks, some leading and others

after them, in the glare of bronze armor followed their leaders.

Lattimore is alert to Homer’s effects, particularly his play with consonant sounds. His “drives downward” in line 2 nicely gets the “d” and “n” sounds in the Greek eisi pedon de, “goes earthward”; and I particularly like the way he reproduces all those liquid “l” sounds in his line “boiling waves a long the length of the roaring water.” He also strives to reproduce the “some … other” construction of the Greek in his “one upon another … some leading and others after them.” You’ll notice, too, that Lattimore favors a long, six-beat line that mimics the six-beat line that Homer uses—one of the ways he tries to conjure the grandeur and expansiveness of Homeric verse.

Four decades after Lattimore, Robert Fagles’s 1990 translation took the field, establishing itself as the preëminent English translation. Fagles uses a loose five-beat line. It can be a bit too loose—it sometimes feels like stacked prose—but has an admirable clarity:

Down the Trojans came like a squall of brawling gale-winds

blasting down with the Father’s thunder, loosed on earth

and a superhuman uproar bursts as they pound the heavy seas,

the giant breakers seething, battle lines of them roaring, 

shoulders rearing, exploding foam, waves in the vanguard,

waves rolling in from the rear. So on the Trojans came,

waves in the vanguard, waves from the rear, closing.

Fagles’s sensitivity to the alliteration of “l” is clear, especially in his first two lines (“squall of brawling gale-winds” is really good), and it’s nice that he tries to suggest Homer’s line-ending alliterations with his end-rhyming “roaring” and “closing”. And at the end of this passage he uses a striking repetition of the word “waves” to suggest the important repetitions of both sounds and words in the original (particularly that “some … others” construction). Some readers will appreciate the way that Fagles (who wrote poetry of his own) amplifies Homer’s “curved” and “white-flecked” waves into waves with “shoulders rearing, exploding foam,” although a little of this poeticizing goes a long way. The big mistake, to my mind, is the way Fagles blurs the line between the two parts of the simile: the waves and the battle-lines of Trojans. By importing the diction of warfare into the first part of the simile (“battle-lines” of waves, a “vanguard” of waves), he actually weakens the impact of the simile overall. Nonetheless, it’s a strong, successful rendering, with an energy and verve appropriate to the lines themselves.

To my mind, the sensitivity to sound effects shown by both of those translators isn’t strongly present in the new translation by Stephen Mitchell. What I like best about Mitchell’s version is its strong five-beat rhythm—arguably the best yet in English. But as his rendering of our passage shows, there’s virtually no attempt here to reproduce the sound effects in the Greek:

The Trojans attacked like a blast of a sudden squall

that swoops down to earth with lightning and thunder, churning 

the dark sea into a fury, and countless waves

surge and toss on its surface, high-arched and white-capped,

and crash down onto the seashore in endless ranks:

just so did the Trojans charge in their ranks, each battalion

packed close together.

The only repetition here is “ranks” in the fifth and sixth lines, and we get virtually none of those alliterations and sea-sounds, which the earlier translators grappled with. I find, too, that there is a general heightening of diction—“attacked” for “went in,” “swoops” for “goes,” “countless” for “many,” “battalion” for “rank”—and a loss of some fine points (“fury” misses the fact that Homer’s thespesioi homadoi, “with an inhuman din” is meant to evoke a sound). There’s a lot of energy here, but Homer knows better how to pace himself and mete out his effects.

I’ve done a translation myself (of a modern Greek poet), and my guess is that you could spend an entire working day solving the problems presented in this six-line passage—nailing down the meaning in a first draft, perhaps, and then spending several hours working out how to get the sound effects, to say nothing of the rhythm. At this rate, it would take about seven years to translate the Iliad—assuming you worked on weekends. That’s just about how long it took Alexander Pope to produce his Iliad; it was announced in 1713 and the final volume was published in 1720. Many consider it the greatest English Iliad, and one of the greatest translations of any work into English. It manages to convey not only the stateliness and grandeur of Homer’s lines, but their speed and wit and vividness:

As when from gloomy clouds a whirlwind springs,

That bears Jove’s thunder on its dreadful wings,

Wide o’er the blasted fields the tempest sweeps;

Then, gather’d, settles on the hoary deeps;

The afflicted deeps tumultuous mix and roar;

The waves behind impel the waves before,

Wide rolling, foaming high, and tumbling to the shore:

Thus rank on rank, the thick battalions throng,

Chief urged on chief, and man drove man along.

One small example of the many beauties of this translation is the precision and detail of the fifth line. In Homer, those two gurgling adjectives, paphladzonta and polyphloisboio slow the line down mightily—you have to chew on them a bit, roll them around in your mouth, make the surf-noises. Pope manages this in English by dragging the line out with the many s sounds— “deeps,” “tumultuous,” “mix”; and by placing “deeps” before “tumultuous,” he forces your tongue to drag a bit as it searches for the helpful “t” in “tumultuous” to latch onto again before you can move on. It’s just one of many tiny effects that accumulate to make this at once the grandest and the most minutely detailed there is ever likely to be.

10 New Must-Reads for November

10 New Must-Reads for November

Blue Nights, Joan Didion (November 1)

Seeing as it’s probably the most hyped book of the month, we doubt we even have to tell you why you should be excited about Didion’s newest memoir. A heartbreaking portrait of loss from one of our most wonderful and powerful contemporary memoirists, Blue Nights is an ode both to Didion’s daughter, to her own grief, and to the senselessness and serenity of the never-ending cycle of birth, old age, sickness and death.

The Prague Cemetery

A sensitive reader might get the impression while reading The Prague Cemetery that Umberto Eco does not much care what you, think about him as an author or the story he has to tell. In a note at the front of the book, Eco envisions one of two kinds of people who might flip through his pages. The first has no idea that the events described in the book actually happened. This reader, accidentally drawn from the great unwashed masses, “knows nothing about nineteenth-century literature, and might even have taken Dan Brown seriously.” The second reader, on the other hand, understands the historical and contemporary significance of said events. To this reader Eco would perhaps append the adjectives “educated” and “worthy.” I don’t know why Eco felt it necessary to start the reading experience off so combatively, but while this attitude would make him a wearisome dinner guest, it needn’t necessarily stand in the way of a good story.

In addition to being a sometimes novelist, Umberto Eco is a philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, and author of dozens of learned books a wide variety of topics, from medieval history to mass media and culture. He made his name in literary circles with his first novel, The Name of the Rose, a quest for a mythical lost work of Aristotle that is, in fact, a Dan Brown-esque page-turner that does not make you feel dumb inside.[1]

Published just over three decades later, The Prague Cemetery, Eco’s fifth novel, is told through a series of journals and letters written by and between Captain Simone Simonini (a racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, spy, forger, master of disguise, and proprietor of the seedy Parisian pawn shop he uses as a front) and Abbé Dalla Piccola (a pietistic and self-righteous Catholic priest).[2] Interspersed throughout book are chapters, written by an unnamed narrator, that summarize large swaths of the journals and letters thought by this unnamed narrator to be too boring. The story wanders through the history of Europe from 1830 through 1898, pausing along the way to insert Simonini into historical events such as the unification of Italy, the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, and, finally, the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On the surface, The Prague Cemetery appears to be cut from the same cloth as The Name of the Rose, but Eco unfortunately remained faithful to a premise that is interesting in theory but that ultimately got in the way of a good story.

The premise? What if there was one man—Captain Simonini—behind some of the most significant events in Europe during the late nineteenth century? And what if this man wakes up one morning to find he can’t remember significant chunks of the previous month? And what if he discovers there is a priest living in a room attached to his apartment by a secret hallway who seems to have knowledge—discovered through the surreptitious reading of his journals and letters—of the days (and only those days) that Simonini can’t remember? As Simonini attempts to reconcile all of this, the novel meanders toward the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and to his moment of self-discovery (discovered by the reader about 300 pages earlier), but by the time you arrive at the book’s destination you only wish that Eco had taken a page or two from Dan Brown.

In the aforementioned author’s note, Eco makes a point to emphasize that Captain Simonini is the only fictional character of any consequence in the novel, an assertion confirmed through research conducted by this reviewer on a randomly selected sampling of characters. For example, very old Europeans as well as students of nineteenth-century history may recognize Guiseppe Garibaldi,[3] Leo Taxil,[4] or possibly Edouard Drumont[5]. These and many (many) others flit in an out of the book, not as developed characters but as a parade of names that reveal Eco’s thorough command of European history but do little in service of a coherent story.

Eco seems to understand this—at one point Simonini writes that his mind is a “continual cloud” and that he is letting his pen wander wherever his instinct leads. And in an appendix titled “Useless Learned Explanations,” Eco includes a timeline for the reader “who is not so quick on the uptake” along with the note that “the Narrator, to be honest, has often found it difficult finding his own way around, but feels a competent reader need not become lost in the detail and enjoy the story just the same.” The incompetent reader is left wondering what he or she ever did to get on the wrong side of Umberto Eco.

From The Name of the Rose to The Prague Cemetery, Eco has repeatedly turned to conspiracies as a narrative device in his fiction and he imbues a great deal of significance on the relationship between the historical record and the events and people depicted in his newest novel. Returning again to the author’s note and his ideal reader, Eco writes,  “The fact that history can be quite so devious may cause this reader’s brow to become lightly beaded with sweat. He will look anxiously behind him, switch on all the lights, and suspect that these things could happen again today. In fact, they may be happening in that very moment. And he will think, as I do: ‘They are still among us…’” If not for the fact that he had pejoratively referenced Dan Brown and his readers just lines earlier, I would assume that Eco was having a little fun here, but I think he’s serious.

There are the makings of a good story in The Prague Cemetery, maybe even two or three, but instead we have what seem like research notes hastily formed into something loosely resembling a novel. Midway through the book, Captain Simonini accurately describes my experience reading The Prague Cemetery: “I didn’t understand the link between the various events he was describing, but the story seemed to revolve around the continual threat from three evil powers that were surreptitiously taking over the world…” Yep, that’s about right.

Reviewed by David Johnson

The Shock Doctrine

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE

THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries. 

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets. 

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay. 

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998. 

Plato's Symposium

Plato's Symposium

Plato developed a two layer view of reality, the world of Becoming and the world of Being. The world of Becoming is the physical world we percieve through our senses. This world is always in movement, always changing. The world of Being is the world of forms, or ideas. It is absolute, independent, and transcendent. It never changes and yet causes the essential nature of things we percieve in the world of Becoming. Though Plato was sometimes vague about the exact relationship between the two worlds, he has suggested two ways in which they may interact. Objects in the material world may be only imperfect copies or imitations of the ideal, and objects may participate in the formness they are representing. The Symposium has suggested to me that Plato may have arrived at a new understanding of the relationship between the two worlds when dealing with the particular form of Man. In the Symposium, Plato seems to have reasoned out an internal mechanism through which men may make their way through the world of Becoming to the world of Being. He shows how, through the most mysterious and powerful medium of love, men may eventually arrive at the Highest Good, an intuitive and mystical state of consciousness. As Diotema says, only in such an experience is ultimate meaning found for human beings.

I think it's interesting to note Diotema's argument takes place solely within the framework of Socrates' memory: She is one more step removed, by space and time, from the reality of Agathon's party and, by analogy, her argument is that much more evolved beyond the arguments that have gone before. Her dialogue with Socrates about the nature of love seems to be in three parts. In the first part, Diotema establishes the concept of duality in differentiating between the mortal and divine and claims love is an informing spirit, and a bridge, between the two worlds. She does this by agreeing with Socrates that love is a lover of beautiful things, and since one does not pursue that which one already has, love cannot be divine because gods already possess the good and the beautiful. Diotema then relates the parable of poverty and plenty, emphasizing love's dual nature; it springs from need and lack but has the possiblity of eliciting from human beings endurance and great achievement. She relates this concept to the personal by saying a philosopher, like love, is a mean between the opposites of wisdom and ignorance, and concludes love is a philosopher. Just as philosophy is a quest between what is and wha

Though this first part seems to be the bulk of Diotema's argument, Socrates questions its usefullness, so Diotema moves from her more abstract argument, and restates her points in the second part, relying on particulars and analogy. She helps Socrates clarify that those who pursue the good through love can eventually gain happiness, the point of fulfillment where desire and need are satisfied. This endpoint is the ideal, the essence of the good, and she alludes to the philosopher again when she reiterates that though there are many avenues of this pursuit, only one of these will help one gain the ideal. They then agree that love is the love of having the good (the ideal) for oneself always. Diotema claims the process of pursuing the good is by creation through both body and soul. The desire to create (or procreate) is a divine urge in a mortal creature, stimulated by any contact with beautiful things and deadened when one encounters ugliness. Whether one creates in the body by having children, or in the soul by creating works of art and philosophy, here Diotema again emphasizes the duality of the mortal and the divine, and restates the point that love is not an end in itself, but is for 'birthing' in the beautiful; it is a process and a bridge between the two worlds, a gateway toward attaining immortality. She discounts the other avenues of pursuing the good by saying that any love that does not include the desire for the eternal will not be the love of having the good for oneself always.

In the third part of Diotema's argument, which Socrates tells us takes place at a later date than the preceding discussions, Diotema draws distinctions between the two roads to immortality, somewhat dismissing the pursuit of immortality through procreation in the body as she discusses the mating urges of the animal world, and concentrates on the process of soul growth. This part really comes to the heart of Socrates' mystical viewpoint and relates very clearly to his Divided Line. Diotema says the process is like the ascent of a staircase, in which one moves from the love of one beautiful body to the love of two, until one loves beautiful bodies in general. Here, one arrives at the point where one can see the same beauty (the divine spark), in essence, in every person. Then, one pursues Beauty in practices and accumulation of knowledge, arriving at last at the perfect learning which is that of Beauty itself, which can only be percieved with the mind. Diotema makes the wonderful statement that this contemplation of Beauty (the Good) itself is the only thing that makes life worth living for men. Touching the apex of Socrates' Divided Line is the only true and worthwhile experience, far beyond the value of wealth and sensuous pleasures, for here one touches the ultimate reality, God, and becomes, in a sense, divine oneself. Socrates' first statement following Diotema's conclusion is notable when he says, "One could not find a better helper for human nature than love." Here, Socrates demonstrates understanding, at last, of the true role of love in human life, as a helper and bridge, by eliciting desire through the awareness of lack and by identifying with our hereditary connection and remembrance of fullfillment, from the world of Becoming back to the world of Being.

Plato's Symposium follows the form of the Divided Line. If the preceding discussion between Diotema and Socrates includes the intuitional knowledge about the true nature of love and its place in human existence, knowledge obtained at the top, then the arguments preceding reflect the ascent from Becoming to Being in refining one's understanding of what love is, and the events following reflect a descent back into the mortal world. Phaidros delivers the first argument, stating the most obvious facts about love: That love is a great god, that it is one of the most powerful forces driving men's actions, and a superior romance is one in which one lover is willing to die for the other. However, Phaidros stays in the lower realm of personal and physical love and makes the mistake of, in Diotema's words, taking "one kind of love, and giving it the name of the whole, love."

Pausanias goes beyond Phaidros' one-dimensional praise and introduces the idea of dualism. One type of love is "common", based on sensuality, works at random, and produces children, the other love is "heavenly", based on companionship, involves mental and soul oriented pursuits, and produces virtue. Conscious choice, rather than happenstance, plays a great part in "heavenly" love. Pausanias claims this love should be encouraged and relates its pursuit to the health of society, and says it can only become ugly if exploitation is a motive of the lover. However, Pausanias does not discriminate between the physical and spiritual aspects of "heavenly" love, claiming this love itself is so good it's ennobling. Though he has brought out one of Diotema's major points, the idea of duality in love, Pausanias' analysis is much less exact than Diotema's and he fails to see the limitations inherent in physicality.

Eryximachos compliments Pausanias on his explanation of the dual nature of love, and argues for a balance between the two, claiming both are required for a peaceful existence. Here, Eryximachos has vaguely introduced Diotema's idea of a "bridge" between two differing states, but the physical aspects of love are still not clearly separated from the spiritual aspects and Eryximachos, in a kind of empirical zeal, equates one kind of love with illness.

Aristophenes relates the power of love to the human pursuit of wholeness by introducing a myth, like the myth of the Fall, in which humans were divided into male and female. This is a different level of loving in which two come together to become one, to find union in body and soul. Aristophenes is suggesting the possibilities of human love in that the desire for unity with another is symbolic of the desire of unity with the essence of the good, or God. He agrees with Diotema that unity itself is a good, but Aristophenes fails to point out that unity should be ultimately with the essence of Beauty, unity with another human being is just an experience on the way.

Agathon addresses this weakness in Arisophenes' argument when he points out that love is the way by which all things are made or created. When humans are motivated by love, they create in many ways besides the physical, indeed all creations are made by love. Agathon has hit upon one of Diotema's final points, that love is a creative force, it is an avenue through which we manifest our own potential, and help others to manifest theirs.

Each speaker leading up to Diotema's argument unveils one layer of what love is and what it can be, Pausanias introduces dualism, Eyximachos introduces balance, Aristophenes emphasizes physical unity, and Agathon speaks of creative unity, but it is up to Diotema to tie all these elements together and then take us to the top by showing that though all these are forms of love, true happiness lies in the contemplation of the essence of Beauty (or the Good) itself, which can be known only by the mind, and which is the final goal of the human experience of love.

The introduction of Alcibiades is the first step down from Diotema's and Socrates' dialogue. Alcibiades, a former lover of Socrates, is symbolic, when he and Socrates were friends, of the type of relationship described by Agathon. We learn theirs was a friendship based on pursuits of virtue and knowledge, and thanks to Socrates' restraint, physicality was absent. Then, Socrates warns Agathon that Aclibiades wants them to quarrel, and there seems to be a suggestion of a physical, love relationship between Agathon and Socrates. The descent is completed when the party concludes the evening with drinking, many leave, and we are told Socrates spends the rest of the night talking with Aristophenes and Agathon. These two finally also fall asleep and Socrates leaves and goes about his day as usual. So on the way down the Divided Line, the dialogue moves from trying to understand the essential nature of love to trying tounderstand certain kinds of love to practicing love in its various forms.

I was very struck by Agathon's desire to benefit from Socrates' wisdom through physical contact. Can I get what you have by touching you, or looking at you? Is it transmitted through the senses? Of course the answer is no because wisdom exists on a plane beyond the physical. Plato's Symposium reveals love, like wisdom, to be a dynamic, a flow of energy that operates throughout all the levels of human awareness, uniting and transcending or fragmenting and descending as it flows. There are latent possibilities in different kinds of love to either pull us up to Socrates' unified and ultimate good in the world of Being, or to pull us down into a dense, fragmented experience of the forms. When Diotema asks Socrates what is it that one desires when one loves, the answer is immortality, union with the eternal, and though we see divinity in all of life, it is contained in various forms which can often corrupt of distort it, as well as accurately reflect it. This is the human condition and dilemma.

Humans have a dual nature, existing in matter with the potential of the divine. We are a microcosm within the macrocosm. Love exemplifies this longing to realize the divine within us and to help others realize their potential, as well. Love helps us to find a relationship between the two worlds we live in. Employing Diotema's process of ascent, it is a movement upward to a finer and finer sense of what love is, and as we ascend we come closer to God through love's prompting our own abilities to create, first on the physical plane, then on correspondingly finer planes in the creation of works of art, which can range from a piece of literature, to a relationship, to ourselves. Love relationships have a special potential in developing spirituality, for in searching for and recognizing the divine within the beloved, one discovers the divine in oneself, and comes to recognize that, in all its forms, divinity is one and the same. Here, love can lift one up and love's beauty lies in its ability to do this for human beings. It is a process, not an end in itself, in which humans can touch the divine and in this state of perception the mystical experience takes place, a union of the human spirit with God. I agree with Diotema that this experience is ultimately the most meaningful of human experiences, purest and most refined in quality, and love, in all it's various forms, can help one get there, again and again.

© 1992 Shirley Galloway

Aleph

“When you reach the end of the novel and reflect on it, you realise that the sublime place that contains all lives and all universes is not just in its pages or in the title of the book. In literary terms, Paulo Coelho’s novel is, itself, the Aleph.” 
Pilar Obón

“When I was twenty-two, I devoted myself to the study of magic. I followed various paths, walked too close to the edge of the abyss, slipped and fell, gave up and returned to the path. I imagined that by the time I reached fifty-nine, I would be close to achieving the paradise and absolute peace that I think I see in the smiles of Buddhist monks. However, the search for peace has its price, and I ask myself: just how far am I prepared to go?”

In a frank and surprising personal story, which draws the reader in from the very first page, Paulo Coelho reveals how a grave crisis of faith caused him to go in search of a path of spiritual renewal and growth. In order to get close to God again, he decided to start over: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the world.

Between March and July 2006, letting himself be guided by signs, he travelled to various continents – Europe, Africa and Asia – on a journey through time and space, through past and present, in search of himself.

As the journey progresses, Paulo gradually emerges from his isolation, sheds both ego and pride and opens himself up to friendship, love, faith and forgiveness, unafraid to confront the inevitable challenges of life.

In Brasil, as soon as it was released. ALEPH went directly to # 1 in all major bestselling lists, and kept the position for several weeks.

Paulo Coelho