More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful.
I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich.
The Fox clapped his hands and sang, ‘Prettier than Andromeda, prettier than Helen, prettier than Aphrodite herself.’ ‘Speak words of better omen, grandfather,’ I said, though I knew he would scold and mock me for saying it. For at his words, though on that summer day the rocks were too hot to touch, it was as if a soft, cold hand had been laid on my left side, and I shivered. ‘Babai!’ said the Fox. ‘It is your words that are ill omened. The Divine Nature is not like that. It has no envy.’ But whatever he said, I knew it is not good to talk that way about Ungit.
‘Oh, it’s dangerous, dangerous,’ said I. ‘The gods are jealous. They can’t bear—’ ‘Daughter, it doesn’t matter a straw,’ said the Fox. ‘The Divine Nature is without jealousy. Those gods—the sort of gods you are always thinking about—are all folly and lies of poets. We have discussed this a hundred times.’
Only the gods know if those who recovered were those whom Psyche had touched, and gods do not tell.
The smell of old age, and the smell of the oils and essences they put on those girls, and the Ungit smell, filled the room. It became very holy.
And either way there is a devouring . . . many different things are said . . . many sacred stories . . . many great mysteries. Some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing. For in sacred language we say that a woman who lies with a man devours the man.
Much less does it give them understanding of holy things. They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book. I, King, have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood. Why should the Accursed not be both the
...more
‘That’s just like the gods,’ he muttered. ‘Drive you to do a thing and then punish you for doing it. The comfort is I’ve no wife or son, Fox.’
She sat on my knees when she was little. . . . I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.’
‘Would you like to be Redival? What? No? Then she’s pitiable.
He calls the whole world a city. But what’s a city built on? There’s earth beneath. And outside the wall? Doesn’t all the food come from there as well as all the dangers? . . . things growing and rotting, strengthening and poisoning, things shining wet . . . in one way (I don’t know which way) more like, yes, even more like the house of—’ ‘Yes, of Ungit,’ said I. ‘Doesn’t the whole land smell of her? Do you and I need to flatter gods any more? They’re tearing us apart . . . oh, how shall I bear it? . . . and what worse can they do?
(Food for the gods must always be found somehow, even when the land starves.)
No herd of other beasts, gathered together, has so ugly a voice as Man.
There is no escape from them into sleep or madness, for they can pursue you into them with dreams. Indeed you are then most at their mercy. The nearest thing we have to a defence against them (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one.
Weakness, and work, are two comforts the gods have not taken from us. I’d not write it (it might move them to take these also away) except that they must know it already.
I was loved; more than I had thought.
To love, and to lose what we love, are equally things appointed for our nature.
for I was now old enough to know that a man (above all, a Greek man) can find comfort in words coming out of his own mouth.
‘Lady,’ he said, ‘I’ll make free with you. I’ve known sorrow too. I have been as you are now; I have sat and felt the hours drawn out to the length of years. What cured me was the wars. I don’t think there’s any other cure.’
The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.
‘No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal—ashamed of being a mortal.’ ‘But how could you help that?’ ‘Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can’t help?’
Don’t you think a dream would feel shy if it were seen walking about in the waking world?
‘You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred.
Or, at least, had it been so in the very past, before this god changed the past? And if they can indeed change the past, why do they never do so in mercy?
(He spoke it as kindly and heartily as could be; as if a man dashed a gallon of cold water in your broth and never doubted you’d like it all the better.)
But I was wrong to weep and beg and try to force you by your love. Love is not a thing to be so used.’
I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understand why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was—not at all that it blotted out these sorrows—but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and reverend for feeling them. I was a great, sad queen in a song. I did not check the big tears that rose in my eyes. I enjoyed them. To say all, I was drunk; I played the fool.
This is what it is to be a man. The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women.
And now those divine Surgeons had me tied down and were at work. My anger protected me only for a short time; anger wearies itself out and truth comes in.
Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.
But of course, like all these sacred matters, it is and it is not
‘Oh, always this, Queen,’ said she. ‘That other, the Greek Ungit, she wouldn’t understand my speech. She’s only for nobles and learned men. There’s no comfort in her.’
This vision, anyway, allowed no denial. Without question it was true. It was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine. I was that Batta-thing, that all-devouring womb-like, yet barren, thing. Glome was a web—I the swollen spider, squat at its centre, gorged with men’s stolen lives.
There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.
oh, you’ll say (you’ve been whispering it to me these forty years) that I’d signs enough her palace was real, could have known the truth if I’d wanted. But how could I want to know it?
I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
‘Are the gods not just?’ ‘Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But come and see.’
I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you. I might—