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So, it's time to admit that I am never going to finish "Moby Dick". I have tried several times, because there are so many who think so highly of it, but there comes a limit. As best I can tell, it's a sprawling, undisciplined, overlong mess about a bunch of escaped lunatics riding around in a boat trying to find and kill a whale. The theme definitely does not help - it's like trying to empathize with the personal problems of a Nazi einsatzkommando.
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I *am* quite liking "The Epic of Gilgamesh". For some reason I never read this before, despite generally liking seriously old books. A good deal of it, I'm sure, is that I have that classic Western distrust of Mesopotamia as a gushing fountain of wickedness and depravity. That initially stems from exposure to the Bible as a child, I'm sure, although modern-day Iraq has done little to dispel the impression.
This was written down some 4k years ago, and in many ways it's like reading an SF novel. The people lived in *such* a different world, and yet they were human like us. The fact that it's 4000 years old breaks my brain. "Old" for me is generally something like Suetonius or Herodotus. What would Gilgamesh and the people of 'Uruk of the ramparts' make of me, and the things that hold my attention, and the way that I live? Would I appear fully human to them? I'm quite sure that I could have dinner with Suetonius, and find a great deal of common ground. With Gilgamesh or Enkidu, I'm much less sure.
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I *am* quite liking "The Epic of Gilgamesh". For some reason I never read this before, despite generally liking seriously old books. A good deal of it, I'm sure, is that I have that classic Western distrust of Mesopotamia as a gushing fountain of wickedness and depravity. That initially stems from exposure to the Bible as a child, I'm sure, although modern-day Iraq has done little to dispel the impression.
This was written down some 4k years ago, and in many ways it's like reading an SF novel. The people lived in *such* a different world, and yet they were human like us. The fact that it's 4000 years old breaks my brain. "Old" for me is generally something like Suetonius or Herodotus. What would Gilgamesh and the people of 'Uruk of the ramparts' make of me, and the things that hold my attention, and the way that I live? Would I appear fully human to them? I'm quite sure that I could have dinner with Suetonius, and find a great deal of common ground. With Gilgamesh or Enkidu, I'm much less sure.
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