The Olive-Tree Bed and Other Quests

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Father Owen Lee is—and I offer this as a high compliment—a
traditonal humanist. Best known as a regular commentator and panelist on
the Saturday Afternoon at the Met opera broadcasts from New York, he is
also a Catholic priest and a retired professor of classics at the
University of Toronto. He therefore has special training in theology and
in the Greek and Latin literatures. But he is primarily a teacher who
combines his manifold interests and shares his acquired knowledge,
generously and lucidly, with the intelligent general public.

This book is an expanded version of the Robson Classical Lectures
delivered by Lee in 1995 at Victoria College in the University of
Toronto. The original lectures focused on Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s
Aeneid, and Wagner’s Parsifal, comparing and contrasting their use of
the quest motif as a literary and structural device. For this book, Lee
has added a similar essay devoted to Goethe’s Faust.

Lee assumes a broad cultural interest but no specialist expertise on
the part of his listeners and readers. He quotes from his chosen texts
in translation and is careful to remind his audience of the basic facts
of each plot, though without lapsing into plodding summary. He
intersperses his comments with personal anecdotes and is not afraid to
include his own private responses to the texts under discussion.

Certain academic specialists might approach these lectures with
suspicion, but they would be wrong to do so. At a time when the great
classics of the past are in danger of seeming remote to the restless,
computer-ridden present, such popularization (when offered with
seriousness and sensitivity, as it is here) performs a necessary, even
vital function. Lee may not add anything startling to what is already
known about these texts, but he has much to offer in stressing the power
and importance of cultural continuity. We are all questers, and The
Olive-Tree Bed not only illuminates the quests of Odysseus, Aeneas,
Parsifal, and Faust but has much to tell us about our own life journeys.