WHY not start with a line of poetry for once? “The eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera open on to Homer’s world, not ours.”

That is the opening of Auden’s dense, gorgeously argued poem “Memorial for the City.” In the Iliad, there is a passage in which the gods look on the struggling heroes like vultures watching from a tree. There is nothing in the end but force to move the world, in which we mortals live and die: “One enjoys glory; one endures shame, He may; she must. There is no one to blame.” I thought of this when reading Rowan Williams’s review in The New Statesman of a new translation of the Iliad, which starts off from Simone Weil rather than Auden, but travels a similar path.

Lord Williams writes: “Homer’s unsparing description of human conflict (not just battle and bloodshed but malice, rivalry and terror) shows us a world in which mechanism triumphs over grace — ‘grace’ being understood by Weil as anything that leaves us free to step aside from the tyranny of the ego and make room for one another, free to absorb and not to transmit violence.”

He continues: “Homer never argues or rebukes: but he diagnoses the sickness. The confusion between humanity and deity, the identification of self-interest with the eternal order of things, is the root of murderous and uncontrollable strife. It appears wherever we turn our eyes, but Homer, it seems, wants us to know that it is something we choose, not something we are doomed to repeat everlastingly. Yes, everyone you love will die. But you have some choices about how far you go on reinforcing the patterns that kill them hideously and prematurely.”

Here, I think that Lord Williams is more pious than the poet. Perhaps that is only proper. But, in the Auden poem, we are forbidden to despair — something that almost seems to make our predicament worse. In Lord Williams’s view, and perhaps Weil’s, we can change, and turn away towards another world. Either way, this is a review that turned me back to the Auden, and made me order Emily Wilson’s Iliad translation. It is difficult to think that a review could accomplish more than provoking both thought and the desire for more experience.

THAT is about the opposite of most journalism. So, it’s difficult to know how distressed to feel at the prediction by Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corporation, that generative AI will lead to a “tsunami of job losses”.

Somehow, in these warnings, the catastrophe is always in the future, and never in the damage that humans can cause, armed with spreadsheets and audience measurements instead of AI. Nearly 60 per cent of American newsroom jobs disappeared in the past decade. Mr Thompson warned of an “ever-shrinking cycle of sanity surrounded by a reservoir of rubbish. . . It will evolve into essentially a maggot-ridden mind mould.” It is true that his company publishes the Wall Street Journal and The Times, but also The Sun, and it is owned by the man who also owns Fox News.

ONE of the pleasures of writing about religion is to discover how deeply anti-Zen most forms of Buddhism have been. Instead of the austere and atheist, profoundly apophatic and iconoclastic forms that have found footholds in the West, the native stuff is alive with demons and demigods. Passion — desire — is not shunned as a snare leading only to more illusion. The artist rolls in desire like a horse rolls on the grass.

This is very obvious in the bloodthirsty side of Tibetan Buddhism, where protector deities with an armour made of skulls live on islands in a lake of blood. But it is found far outside Tibet: The New York Review of Books has an essay by William Dalrymple on an exhibition of such things: “Early Buddhist art is shot through with the cosmology of ancient animist cults that existed before the arrival of the new teachings,” he writes.

“The first Buddhist monks believed that they lived in a spiritually charged landscape, alive with powerful local godlings and spirits — called yakshas when male and yakshis when female — who took up residence in the trees and stones and streams around monasteries. These spirits personified the forces of nature and revealed themselves at will.

“All this is set amid a sacred landscape where the jungles were alive with wonders — lotus buds that spilled priceless gems and jewels with the abundance of magical cornucopias, and eagle-beaked griffins and many-headed cobras that competed to protect the turban of the Buddha or the dust of his disciples.

“They were part of a landscape filled with ghosts howling in the charnel grounds and dangerously seductive yakshis hanging from tree branches.”

Perhaps I am a coarse and crude person, but this does sound so much more enticing than the stern beauties of a gravel Zen garden; and yet that is what has survived to thrive today. Both these tendencies can obviously be found in Christianity; but here, for the moment, it is the exuberant and colourful that survive. I still find it difficult to imagine our own bishops perched up trees and hanging from branches in a dangerously seductive way.