It isn’t happiness I am concerned with but experience.
A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.
It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.
Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.
Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune.
When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.