I’ve been ruminating on a sentiment expressed by Carlos Fuentes, that the great tragedy of modernity, of the modern world, is the absence of tragedy. Of course, one may check the news and feel that this is an absurd claim. But the news does not convey tragedy. The news is a catalogue of unending catastrophes and accidents and wicked deeds that are inhuman and therefore impossible to metabolize.

Catastrophe implies that if only we could get our shit together, things could be otherwise. With enough scientific and social improvements, with enough reason and resources, we can extirpate our nasty bits1 and fix nature and will ourselves into wellbeing.

Tragedy is profoundly human; it is the surrender of the will to the shitshows we are. Tragedy is catastrophe infused with poetic consciousness. Poetry is the force that animates; without it, we are stuck.2

Last week, I finished Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. Why does this epic poem persist through history, and why are we continuously compelled to revive Homeric hymns through fresh translations?

Much of The Iliad is litany and simile; litanies of the dead and their devastated families and similes likening the behavior of the Greeks and Trojans to starving lions delighted by a carcass, leaves briefly flaming up with life before they shrivel up and die, and courageous flies persistently yearning to bite a human’s flesh. Initially, I sped through the lists to get to the “real” action, but upon further reflection these lists serve as elemental connective tissue.

The creatures of the world are more than scenery, more than economic resources, more than spectacles to gawk at or nuisances to be swatted away. Lions experience delight the way we experience delight, leaves are mortal the way we are mortal, flies are bold the way we are bold. The poet’s insistent use of simile reels us back from intellectual constructions of abstract apartness into primal being.

A second innocence is possible, surprise is possible. Achilles, the inimical muscle-man who is othered by his superiority, experiences release. His best friend/erotic doppelganger, Patroclus, whom he loved like his head, his life, his chest is dead. The man who killed Patroclus, Hector, is also dead. And yet, it is through an encounter with the Trojan King Priam (Hector’s father) that the painfully tight fist of Achilles’ heart opens.

Priam, who grieves so intensely that he smears himself in dung, goes to Achilles alone to petition the return of his son’s dead body. Achilles gives the advice his own bitter heart needs to Priam: But ever since the gods who live in heaven/brought you this pain, your town has been surrounded/ by constant carnage and unending warfare./ You must endure it. Do not let your heart/ lament forever. You will do no good/ by grieving for your son. You cannot raise him/ to life again, and death will overtake you/ before you save your son.

You must endure it.

The endurance of the heart is what lends humanity its gravitas. Whereas the great immortal Gods indulge in petty schemes and whine over little scratches, humans experience infinite emotions within their finite bodies. Designed to be defeated, humans lose. But with every crushing blow to life as we know it, we are invited to be enlarged by all that we do not know.

Before Achilles and Priam part ways, they marvel at each other: Dardanian Priam marveled at Achilles –/ his size, his beauty. He looked like the gods./ Achilles marveled at Dardanian Priam –/ his fine appearance and the words he spoke./ They gazed at one another in surprise.

The highest aspiration of tragedy is an education in tenderness. In this brief encounter, Homer offers an alternative stance to the age-old dynamic of us versus them. This is how we might choose to carry ourselves in a world filled with habitual hatred: we might refuse to judge. We might surprise ourselves.

For Homer, tragedy is universal conversation; the poet sounds, and the reader re-sounds. Pages and pages enumerate the devastation on both sides, and all have consumed infinite sorrows. Like Susan Sontag, I am devoted to, attracted to, in thrall of the wisdom project3 – literature that mobilizes that which has become static, the feelings which resist being felt. Homer’s telling of how the ancient Greeks and Trojans ruined themselves through a foolish decade-long war is a testament to our capacity to metabolize pain. A lot of pain. A life full of pain.

I found myself imagining what it would be like if communities came together under the umbrella of epic poetry, if bards enacted colloquies of collective trauma as compelling as television dramas, if the private grief and smoldering rage in every heart was lifted as a public burden… is that what it would be like to experience Homeric hymns in Homer’s time? Like dolls with sad faces that make sad girls happy, could tragedy be a salve for existential loneliness, a balm for the terminal uniqueness that sickens our souls?