Circe

by Madeline Miller

You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see.

A chill shivered across my skin. “How do they bear it?” “As best they can.”

“We bear it as best we can,” I said.

But I pressed his face into my mind, as seals are pressed in wax, so I could carry it with me.

But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.

From time to time, in those days, I wondered what I would tell Telegonus if he ever asked me for my own stories. How I might polish Aeëtes, Pasiphaë, Scylla, the pigs. In the end, I did not have to try. He never asked.

The ocean’s weight piled like mountains on my shoulders. But endurance had always been my virtue and I kept on.

clearly. But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

The fame she had described was what all mortals yearn for. It is their only hope of immortality.

I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

There was a piece of me that shouted its alarm: if you speak he will turn gray and hate you. But I pushed past it. If he turned gray, then he did. I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing.

He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.