Sullivan is describing something Homer's audience would have recognized immediately and that we have nearly lost the grammar to say: *thūmos* is not a faculty you possess, it is a presence that acts inside you, and the relationship to it is navigational rather than sovereign. You do not command it. You read it, reckon with it, and decide whether to follow, redirect, or hold it in check — and that deciding is itself done partly by thūmos, which is the recursive knot at the center of Homeric interiority.

What we inherited instead is the fantasy of a unified, self-governing will that stands above its own contents and issues instructions downward. That model made the whole Greek tradition legible to a later philosophical vocabulary, but it also made thūmos illegible — demoted to "passion," a nuisance the rational soul manages. Sullivan's phrasing quietly refuses that demotion. "Vital presence" is careful language: not instinct, not affect, not drive, but something with its own vectors, its own timing, its own claim on the person's action. The phrase "overact" is equally careful — thūmos is not wrong when it surges, it is excessive, which is a relational term, not a moral one. Excess relative to what the moment can bear. That is already a more honest psychology than most of what came after.