Circe

by Madeline Miller

WHEN I WAS BORN, the name for what I was did not exist.

the grudges of gods are as deathless as their flesh,

Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two.

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.

Bold action and bold manner are not the same.

The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.

That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

I had begun to know what fear was. What could make a god afraid? I knew that answer too. A power greater than their own.

But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know.

That is what exile meant: no one was coming, no one ever would. There was fear in that knowledge, but after my long night of terrors it felt small and inconsequential. The worst of my cowardice had been sweated out. In its place was a giddy spark. I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.

I did not mind the emptiness either. For a thousand years I had tried to fill the space between myself and my family.

I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay.

Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands.

Well? What do you have to say to me? You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.

Does no one have the courage? Will no one dare to face me? So you see, in my way, I was eager for what came.

“Yet you would dare to stay?” “I dare anything,” he said. And that is how we came to be lovers.

“Tell me,” he said, “who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one?” “A happy one, of course.” “Wrong,” he said. “A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.” “But surely,” I said, “you have to reward him eventually. Otherwise, he will stop offering.” “Oh, you would be surprised how long he will go on. But yes, in the end, it’s best to give him something. Then he will be happy again. And you can start over.”

You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.

Of all the mortals on the earth, there are only a few the gods will ever hear of. Consider the practicalities. By the time we learn their names, they are dead. They must be meteors indeed to catch our attention. The merely good: you are dust to us.

I came for her, but there was no one who would come for me. The thought was steadying. After all, I had been alone my whole life.

But there was no wound she could give me that I had not already given myself.

My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch.

Not everything may be foreseen. Most gods and mortals have lives that are tied to nothing; they tangle and wend now here, now there, according to no set plan. But then there are those who wear their destinies like nooses, whose lives run straight as planks, however they try to twist. It is these that our prophets may see.

she was not ruled by appetites; she ruled with them instead.

This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun. But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind.

They do not care if you are good. They barely care if you are wicked. The only thing that makes them listen is power.

I had no right to claim him, I knew it. 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.

A golden cage is still a cage.

I had walked the earth for a hundred generations, yet I was still a child to myself.

I had no altar, but I did not need one: anywhere I was became my temple.

The truth is, men make terrible pigs.

“Most men do not know me for what I am.” “Most men, in my experience, are fools,” he said.

I was not careful. I was reckless, headlong. He was another knife, I could feel it. A different sort, but a knife still. I did not care. I thought: give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for.

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

“What was his best part?” “His lover, Patroclus. He didn’t like me much, but then the good ones never do. Achilles went mad when he died; nearly mad, anyway.”

I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.

Living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different color, a different foam-capped height, but always the same restless intensity pulling towards the horizon.

Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating.

Death’s Brother is the name that poets give to sleep. For most men those dark hours are a reminder of the stillness that waits at the end of days.

When he was gone, would I be like Achilles, wailing over his lost lover Patroclus? I tried to picture myself running up and down the beaches, tearing at my hair, cradling some scrap of old tunic he had left behind. Crying out for the loss of half my soul. I could not see it. That knowledge brought its own sort of pain.

He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.

Yet, as strange as it sounds, even in such extremities of misery I was not wholly miserable. I was used to unhappiness, formless and opaque, stretching out to every horizon. But this had shores, depths, a purpose and a shape. There was hope in it, for it would end, and bring me my child. My son. For whether by witchcraft or prophetic blood, that is what I knew he was.

I was giddy feeling his first kicks and I spoke to him every moment, as I crushed my herbs, as I cut clothes for his body, wove his cradle out of rushes. I imagined him walking beside me, the child and boy and man that he would be. I would show him all the wonders I had gathered for him, this island and its sky, the fruits and sheep, the waves and lions. The perfect solitude that would never be loneliness again.

I touched my hand to my belly. Your father said once that he wanted more children, but that is not why you live. You are for me.

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

Children are not sacks of grain, to be substituted one for the other.

He liked best the stories of courage and virtue rewarded. And that is why you must never, you must always, that is why one should be sure to… I loved his certainty, his world that was an easy place of right action divided sharply from wrong, of mistake and consequence, of monsters defeated. It was no world I knew, but I would live in it as long as he would let me.

Witchcraft transforms the world. He wanted only to join it.

Did he know how much those words cost me? I do not think he could. It is youth’s gift not to feel its debts.