fatal beauty...

   I am as close to a pure pacifist as one can be without being a...well...pacifist, but I was struck by this from Bernard Knox's introduction (especially in light of my last post) to Fagles' translation of "The Iliad."

"The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental,to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has it's own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage, and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers,and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter."

Thought provoking, that...