alt Hacker NewsHow so? Serious question, hoping to see you make a point that will get downvoted because it's right :)
Aside: I have been somewhat busy and maybe even too emotionally preoccupied with other stuff to help people here listen to their anger
The teaching-by-jesting is a difficult calling and I don't practise enough! At least not in fields outside my main interests :)
If you don't mind me asking, what are the topics that you do think deeply about? I'm not sure you write about these in the blogs?
Maybe my second interest can be codified as the study of
Making breakthroughs for humanity every man-week of doing, not "breakthroughs" for a few men every thirty man-decades of "thinking"
Homer's stories are essentially mythological. 'Huckleberry Finn,' on the other hand, feels more like satire than myth. But 'Moby-Dick' carries that mythic quality. Ahab is a whaling captain, but at the same time, he appears as a tragic king confronting a world he cannot understand or accept. And Moby Dick seems to symbolize both an animal and nature itself.
Homer's epics feature human heroes who converse with divine beings. 'Moby-Dick' doesn't have that, but the overall atmosphere is mystical enough that I see it that way.
The Pequod is both a commercial vessel and a representation of the American national system. The sea is described as a geographical space, yet also as a universe beyond human comprehension.
There's no question that Mark Twain is a great author representing America. But if I had to choose one mythic work in American literature that corresponds to Homer, I would choose Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'.