Circe

by Madeline Miller

It is hard to describe what happened next. A knowledge woke in the depths of my blood.

For the first time in all my life, I am not tired!

I had made so many mistakes that I could not find my way back through their tangle to the first one.

That is what exile meant: no one was coming, no one ever would.

I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt.

Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

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.

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.

the strongest binding weeds, ilex root and withy, fennel and hemlock, aconite, hellebore.

This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “of naming my son Asterion.

Her skin was bare, except for a necklace made of squares of beaten gold. Each one was embossed: a sun, a bee, an axe, the great hulk of Dicte.

My eyes gave off a faint light, and by it I could see his face.

Perhaps that is no surprise, poets like such symmetries:

It is law that guests must be fed before the host’s curiosity.

I had committed the unpardonable sin of being dull.

A hundred years at least she must have lived with me, pacing at my side, her life extended by the close pulse of my divinity.

Many of the men behind him still had their hands on their sword hilts. It was wise. Islands were dangerous places. You met monsters as often as friends.

There are oracles scattered across our lands.

Know yourself is carved above their doors.

I began to ask him for small favors. Would he kill a buck for dinner? Would he catch a few fish? My sty was falling to pieces, might he mend some of the posts? It gave me a sharp pleasure to see him come in the door with full nets, with baskets of fruit from my orchards. He joined me in the garden, staking vines. We spoke of what winds were blowing, how Elpenor had taken to sleeping on the roof, and whether we should forbid it.

A year of peaceful days

But Athena had no babe, and she never would. Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.

I gave him what was left of a draught. He drenched a bit of the deck, spoke the words he had heard me say. He poked at the wood. “Did it work?” “No,” I said.

those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats.

“I am not asking for a story. You have come to my island. You owe me truth.”

I had begun to see that silence prompted him better than words.

A true-made bow, Odysseus had called her. A fixed star. A woman who knew herself. “I asked her how she did it once, how she understood the world so clearly. She told me that it was a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves.

Outside, trees struggled in the dark sky.

The room was warm and the vintage good.

Penelope said, “What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?” “I do not know for certain,” I said. “I once thought it was passed through blood, but Telegonus has no spells in him. I have come to believe it is mostly will.” She nodded. I did not have to explain. We knew what will was.

“You have a patient temper.” “My father called it dullness. Shearing, cleaning out the hearths, pitting olives. He wanted to know how to do such things for curiosity’s sake, but he did not want to actually have to do them.”

Helios: Titan god of the sun.

Mnemosyne: A goddess of memory, and mother of the nine muses.

Daedalus: A master craftsman,