Lavinia

by Ursula K. Le Guin

But then I think no, it has nothing to do with being dead, it’s not death that allows us to understand one another, but poetry.

Earth will take the plowman in her arms at last and let him sleep deeper than the barley seed,

I was silent and meek because if I spoke up, if I showed my will, she might remember that I was not my brothers, and I’d suffer for it.

“My warriors,” she called the boys, and I thought she was calling me a warrior too, because she was so happy when she called them warriors, and her happiness was ours.

I believe this, knowing that my poet always speaks the truth, if not always the whole truth. Not even a poet can speak the whole truth.

the loving mother, the fierce queen.

That is what it was like in the age of Saturn, my poet said, the golden time of the first days when there was no fear in the world.

He is never sullen, but he is quiet, he handles words as he handles his sword, only when he has to.

I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste.

Why, why is a girl brought up at home to be a woman in exile the rest of her life?”

And the murdered man said, ‘Go on, go, my glory. I am gone. I join the crowd, return to darkness. I hope you find a better fate.’ And speaking, he turned away.”

‘Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?’”

The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that allows, that makes to be.

The nod is the gesture of power, the yes.

They kill together and are killed together.

Things were going as they should go, and in going with them I was free.

it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men.

Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property.

fas, is the desire of his heart.

“Perhaps women have more complicated selves. They know how to do more than one thing at one time. That comes late to men. If at all. I don’t know if I’ve learned it yet.”

vice, an abuse of skill, nefas.

Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.

How could the powers of our earth, our land, be with us if we not only defied the oracle they gave us, but did one of the great acts of evil—the deliberate breaking of a promise?

I felt myself a traitor, as if I had done the great wrong, had caused it simply by being who and what I was.

He saw women as he saw dogs or cattle, members of another species, to be taken into account only as they were useful or dangerous.

I was their daughter, their pledge to the future, a powerless girl yet one who could speak for them to the great powers, a mere token for political barter yet also a sign of what was of true value to us all.

Mars, Mavors, macte esto.

Mars draws a blessing

He nods, rueful at having deceived me, or at having been caught at it.

But what am I to do now? I have lost my guide, my Vergil. I must go on by myself through all that is left after the end, all the rest of the immense, pathless, unreadable world.

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.

the War Gate, the gate that led nowhere whether it was open or shut.

Seeing him made me happy. It brought me joy. I thought I saw a gleam, a reflection of my pleasure in his face.

“Lavinia,” he said, “when I left Troy I could not bring much with me: my father and my son, some of my people, and the gods of my household and my ancestors. My father is with the lords of the underworld; my son Ascanius stands there, and with him are my people, ready to do you honor as his mother and their queen. And my Penates and the sacred things of my ancestors I give you now to keep and cherish on the altars of our house, in the city that will bear your name. They have come a long way to your hearth and heart.”

talassio!”

Talasio (Talassio), ōnis, or Ta-lassius (Thal-), ii, m., a congratulatory exclamation to a bride, in use from the time of Romulus, like the Gr. Ὑμὴν ὦ ν̔μέναιε. Its meaning was unknown to the ancient writers themselves, but it was probably the name of the god of marriage,

He asked the question that is asked: “Who are you?” And I gave the answer that is given: “Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.”

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining.

once Mars rules men, Mars must be obeyed on his own terms.

And my ignorance welcomed his questioning, which taught me what is worth asking.

I longed to see my son of the evening star shine out at last in tranquillity.

It is the king who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit to eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of her Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house.

“What’s the use of skill and courage if you’re dead?” “Hector had no virtue?” “Of course he did. He won all his battles, till the last one.” “We all do,” Aeneas remarked.

to obey one’s fate might be to disobey one’s conscience.

“It’s a good place for a child, the woods. You don’t learn much about people, but you learn silence. Patience. And that there’s nothing much to fear in the wilderness—less than there is on a farm or in the city.”

“How far I came to come home,” he said.

Go on, go. In our tongue it is a single sound, i.

I suppose I am one of my people, made of oak. Oaks don’t bend, though they can break.

I was the she-wolf in the cave, standing stiff-legged, silent, in darkness, ready.

“Oh, never and forever aren’t for mortals, love.

I felt fear but it was entirely different from the sharp dread of losing Silvius, and from the endless alarms and anxieties of living; it was the fear we call religion, an accepting awe. It was the terror we feel when we look up at the sky on a clear night and see the white fires of all the stars of the eternal universe. That fear goes deep. But worship and sleep and silence are part of it.