Maeve’s Reviews > The Secret History > Status Update

‘There are such thing as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.’

‘Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful- is always superficial.’

‘’It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,’ he said. ‘You are like children. Afraid of the dark.’’

‘A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron on the April landscape. Snow was falling in earnest now - big silent petals drifting through the springtime woods, white bouquets segueing into snowy dark: a nightmarish topsy-turvy land, something from a story book. My path took me beneath a row of apple trees, full-blown and luminous, shivering in the twilight like an avenue of pale umbrellas’

‘Dionysus [is] the Master of Illusions, who could make a vine grow out of a ship’s plank, and in general enable his votaries to see the world as the world’s not’ - E.R. Dodds

‘I could hear everybody breathing; quiet, measured breaths that came and went with awful regularity, four sets of lungs, eating at the thin oxygen.’

‘They’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home’

Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue?