Life & Wisdom Quote by William Scott

Homer catching a stray here is less about the Iliad than about the classroom. William Scott’s line works because it refuses the polite lie that the canon is automatically electrifying. “Do not turn students on” is deliberately blunt, almost crude, yanking literary taste out of reverent lecture-speak and into the language of desire and boredom. The provocation isn’t that Homer is “bad.” It’s that institutions keep mistaking historical importance for lived intensity.

The subtext is a critique of how reading gets administered: as duty, as cultural vaccine, as proof of seriousness. Scott’s “it is the truth” performs a weary honesty, like he’s puncturing a faculty-lounge fantasy that teenagers will naturally thrill to epic catalogues, archaic codes of honor, and gods who behave like petty administrators. In that sense, “Homer” becomes shorthand for an entire pedagogy that treats difficulty as virtue and confusion as character-building.

There’s also a sly jab at the gatekeeping reflex: if students aren’t captivated, the assumption is often that they’re lazy or shallow. Scott flips the blame outward. Maybe the packaging is wrong; maybe translation choices, teaching methods, and the expectation of instant reverence drain the work’s power. The line’s sting comes from naming what’s usually hidden: the canon’s authority depends on our pretending it’s universally seductive. Scott breaks that spell, not to cancel Homer, but to demand a more honest theory of how art actually lands in the present tense.