How great literature can change your life

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.—Henry David Thoreau

Friday Memories of Books That Shook My World

When I was a young child, I would spend hours playing with little plastic toy soldiers, bought inexpensively from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. My brothers and I also owned a fleet of Matchbook army vehicles and would imagine elaborate battles. From there, it was a short jump to relishing the battles in The Iliad.

I can accurately report that reading Iliad was one of two experiences that saved my first year of high school, the other being playing for the tennis team. I’ll explain how in a moment. First, however, Freud’s observations in “Creative Writing and Daydreaming” comes to mind. I recognize my childhood play experiences in the following passage: 

The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of own, or rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it.

Then Freud makes the link to reading fiction:

As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the shield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies.

I didn’t have to grow up to make the shift but, yes, the deep pleasure I get from reading I can never give up. I appreciate Freud revealing how deep the pleasure goes.

As far as the Iliad’s importance to 14-year-old me, some background is necessary. After a blissful year in Paris where my brothers and I had free range of the city’s museums and movie theaters, I found myself enrolled in a military high school. Hating the uniforms, the drilling, the hazing, and the Saturday morning inspections (SMIs), I felt thoroughly miserable. 

My English teacher, however, had us read the entire Richard Lattimore translation of The Iliad, the first time I had ever read a great work of literature in a school classroom (which doesn’t say much for my elementary and middle school teachers). I had read a child’s version of Homer’s poem earlier, along with a book of Greek myths, but encountering the epic in its entirety was a far more profound experience. Having said that, however, once again I was lining up opposing armies. I particularly liked it when the gods entered the fray: 

But Zeus who marshals the thunderheads replied, 
“God of the earthquake, well you know my plans, 
the strategy in my mind, and why I call you here 
These mortals do concern me, dying as they are. 
Still, here I stay on Olympus throned aloft, 
here in my steep mountain cleft, to feast my eyes 
and delight my heart. The rest of you: down you go, 
go to Trojans, go to Achaeans. Help either side 
as the fixed desire drives each god to act. 
If Achilles fights the Trojans—unopposed by us—
not for a moment will they hold his breakneck force. 
Even before now they’d shake to see him coming. 
Now, with his rage inflamed for his friend’s death, 
I fear he’ll raze the walls against the will of fate.”

Of course, I was rooting for the Greeks, and it helped that Athena was my favorite god. All the gods that I knew from the individual stories were gathered in one place, a kind of team-up superhero drama such as one encounters in The Avengers:

      And with that command Zeus roused incessant battle. 
Down the immortals launched to the field of action—
their warring spirits split the gods two ways. 
Hera went to the massed ships with Pallas Athena, 
Poseidon who grips the earth, and Hermes god of luck 
who excels them all at subtle twists and tactics—
and the god of fire flanked them, seething power, 
hobbling along but his shrunken legs moved nimbly. 
But Ares swept down to the Trojans, helmet flashing, 
and pacing him went Phoebus with long hair streaming 
and Artemis showering arrows, Leto and River Xanthus 
and goddess Aphrodite strong with eternal laughter.

Particularly thrilling was how the gods were battling each other. It was like how my friends and I took turns picking our favorite toy soldiers and vehicles:

      So the blissful gods were rousing both opposing armies, 
clashing front to front but then, in their own ranks, 
their overpowering strife broke out in massive war. 
Down from the high skies the father of men and gods
let loose tremendous thunder-from down below Poseidon 
shook the boundless earth and towering heads of mountains. 
The whole world quaked, the slopes of Ida with all her springs 
and all her peaks and the walls of Troy and all Achaea’s ships. 
And terror-struck in the underworld, Hades lord of the dead 
cringed and sprang from his throne and screamed shrill, 
fearing the god who rocks the ground above his realm, 
giant Poseidon, would burst the earth wide open now 
and lay bare to mortal men and immortal gods at last 
the houses of the dead—the dank, moldering horrors 
that fill the deathless gods themselves with loathing. 
So immense the clash as the war of gods erupted. 
There, look, rearing against the lord Poseidon 
Phoebus Apollo loomed, bristling winged arrows, 
rearing against Ares, blazing-eyed Athena, 
rearing against Hera, Artemis with arrow of gold
and cry that halloos’ the hunt, the goddess raining shafts, 
Huntress sister of Phoebus the distant deadly Archer—
rearing against Leto, Hermes the running god of luck
and against the Fire-god rose the great deep-swirling river 
immortals call the Xanthus, mankind calls Scamander.

So god went up against god. 

Given my detestation of all things military, it may seem curious that I fantasized about war games, whether with toys or with books. An analysis of gendered play, why a sweet little boy with a girlish side would be more interested in soldiers than dolls, more interested in warrior than caregiver narratives, is beyond the scope of today’s essay. More interesting to me is how Homer’s Iliad brought new complexity to my view of war. Suddenly conflict wasn’t all black and white. It was as though I was being initiated into adulthood.

I found myself sympathizing with certain Trojan characters and being horrified at the brutality of the killings. I shuddered as the greater Ajax kills Troy’s Simoeisios by piercing him in the right nipple so that the spearhead comes back out through the shoulder. And as Menelaus kills Pandarus by striking him in the face so that his spear goes through the cheek close to nose and eye, cuts through the teeth and tongue, and then emerges “underneath the jaw bone.”

To borrow from Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” I was seeing “the pity of war, the pity war distilled.” In that poem Owen makes indirect reference to Achilles’s horrifyingly blood rampage with the line, “when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels.”

I now realize, in my adolescent reaction, that I was responding as French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil does in her famous essay “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.” Regarding it as one of the world’s greatest anti-war works, Weil writes,

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

As Wikipedia sums up Weil’s argument, she

discusses the emotional and psychological violence one suffers if forced to submit to force even when not physically hurt, holding up the slave and the supplicant as examples. She goes on to say force is dangerous not just to the victim, but to whoever controls it, as it intoxicates, partly by numbing the senses of reason and pity. Force thus can turn even its possessor into a thing – an unthinking automaton driven by rage or lust. 

The impact of Weil’s essay was to turn the poem from (Wikipedia again) “a stirring tale of heroic deeds” to “accurate and compassionate depiction of how both victors and victims are harmed by the use of force.”

Additionally significant was the context. Not only was I reading the poem at a military school but at a time when the Vietnam War was heating up (the fall of 1965). Thus it helped me process life around me. When I reached 18, partly because of the poem and partly because of my father (who joined the War Resisters League after returning from World War II), I applied for and received conscientious objector status. Given that my draft number was 51, if the draft hadn’t ended before my college student deferment ran out I would have engaged in some form of social service.

As it was, I participated in multiple peaceful protests against the war, getting arrested once. No force was used.

Previous posts on memorable book encounters
At 12 I Fell in Love with Taming of the Shrew (Oct. 9, 2026)
Alice Captured My Childhood Anxieties (Oct. 2, 2026)
How Tintin Gave Shape to My Sense of Wonder (Sept. 25, 2026)
E. Nesbit’s Formative Moral Influence on My Life (Sept. 18, 2026)
Lord of the Rings: Trudging up Mount Doom with Frodo (Aug. 28, 2026)
The Silver Chair and a Childhood Love (Aug. 21, 2026)
My Childhood Encounter with Wind in the Willows April 14, 2026)