"Circe"

Madeline Miller's "Song of Achilles" didn't move me much except for the very end, so I was quite unprepared for how fierce and alive this one is, and perfect as a coming-of-age story of an immortal at odds with her birthright. It's definitely going onto "books-to-help-my-daughter-become-a-feminist" list. On top of this, Miller's retelling makes so much sense -- Odysseus's downfall, Pasiphae's birthing of the Minotaur, and the two mother-son pairs, remixed.

• Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.
• Yet they were both Titans, and preferred each other’s company to those new-squeaking gods upon Olympus who had not seen the making of the world.
• Frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike-toothed eel.
• Conditions, constrainment. These were novelties to my father, and gods love nothing more than novelty. “A bargain,” he said, and gave her a necklace to seal it... I think she would have gone right on collecting them into eternity until they hung from her neck like a yoke on an ox if the high gods had not stopped her.
• I asked what mortals looked like. My father said, “You may say they are shaped like us, but only as the worm is shaped like the whale.” <> My mother had been simpler: like savage bags of rotten flesh.
• “Will you not come to bed, my love?” She turned before him slowly, showing the lushness of her figure as if she were roasting on a spit.
• This only made them laugh harder, rubbing their draped limbs on each other like snakes polishing their scales.
• “That he fucks them, of course. That’s how he makes new ones. He turns into a bull and sires their calves, then cooks the ones that get old. That’s why everyone thinks they are immortal.”
• They went away, bent over their hopes, thinking what they could not wait to do when Titans ruled again. <> It was my first lesson. Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two.
• On their faces, disappointment braided with relief. No blood, for now.
• But my mind could imagine no further than that. I had never felt a lash. I did not know the color of my blood.
• “It is time for you to go now. Allecto does not like to leave me for long. Her cruelty springs fast as weeds and must any moment be cut again.” <> It was a strange way to put it, for he was the one who would be cut. But I liked it, as if his words were a secret. A thing that looked like a stone, but inside was a seed.
• How does your divinity feel?... Like a column of water that pours ceaselessly over itself, and is clear down to its rocks. Now, you.”
• It was like a great chain of fear, I thought. Zeus at the top and my father just behind. Then Zeus’ siblings and children, then my uncles, and on down through all the ranks of river-gods and brine-lords and Furies and Winds and Graces, until it came to the bottom where we sat, nymphs and mortals both, each eyeing the other.
• I lay in our empty halls, my throat scraping with loneliness,
• His eyes darted whenever I addressed him. I realized with a shock that I knew such gestures. I had performed them a thousand times—for my father, and my grandfather, and all those mighty gods who strode through my days. The great chain of fear.
• That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.
• But what stayed most in my mind was the look on my grandmother’s face when I’d said that word, pharmaka. It was not a look I knew well, among the gods. But I had seen Glaucos when he spoke of the levy and empty nets and his father. 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.
• The naiads laughed like a thousand plashing fountains.
• 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.
• I would have said that Scylla was their darling, and that when the Furies came for me, they would have shouted loudest of all to see my blood. But now when I looked around me, all I saw were faces bright as whetted blades. They clung to each other, crowing. I wish I’d seen it! Can you imagine?
• Here was more sport. They would tell him of his love’s transformation, crack his face like an egg and laugh at what ran out.
• Even the most beautiful nymph is largely useless, and an ugly one would be nothing, less than nothing. She would never marry or produce children. She would be a burden to her family, a stain upon the face of the world... But a monster,” he said, “she always has a place. She may have all the glory her teeth can snatch. She will not be loved for it, but she will not be constrained either. So whatever foolish sorrow you harbor, forget it. I think it may be said that you improved her.”
• “He agrees that something new moves in the world. That these powers are unlike any that have come before. He agrees that they grow from my four children with the nymph Perse.”
• All the while my mother wept in her flock of sisters. When I came close, she raised her face so everyone could see her beautiful, extravagant grief. Have you not done enough?
• My bag was an absurdity, full of gilded detritus.
• My heart had leapt to see him as it always did. But he was like that column of water he had told me of once, cold and straight, sufficient to himself.
• My father, of course, was overhead, shedding his light down on the world. All those years I had spent with them were like a stone tossed in a pool. Already, the ripples were gone.
• I stepped into those woods and my life began... I climbed the peaks where the cypresses speared black into the sky, then clambered down to the orchards and vineyards where purple grapes grew thick as coral.
• Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung. Even after all that, it can fail, as gods do not.
• Witchcraft is nothing but such drudgery... Each spell was a mountain to be climbed anew. All I could carry with me from last time was the knowledge that it could be done. <> I pressed on. If my childhood had given me anything, it was endurance... I learned to understand my own intention, to prune and to add, to feel where the power gathered and speak the right words to draw it to its height. That was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone.
• I understood now Aeëtes’ boldness, how he had stood before our father like a towering peak. When I did my magics, I felt that same span and heft.
• I had scarcely known true intelligence—I had spoken to Prometheus for only a moment, and in all the rest of Oceanos’ halls most of what passed as cleverness was only archness and spite. Hermes’ mind was a thousand times sharper and more swift. It shone like light upon the waves, dazzling to blindness.
• “I was there. Watching Zeus and Helios negotiate is always good entertainment. Like two volcanoes trying to decide if they should blow.”
• But no. Scylla had always wanted the light of day. She had always wanted to make others weep. And now she was a ravening monster filled with teeth and armored with immortality. <> “Can no one stop her?” <> “Zeus could, or your father, if they wished to. But why would they? Monsters are a boon to gods. Imagine all the prayers.”
• 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.
• It made me think of Daedalus, that upright man with fire in his bones. <> What was the thing he would not leave behind? His face when he had spoken of it had been careful, his words placed as if they were tiles in a fountain.
• His shoulders were taut, tensed as if against a blow. The last time he had thanked me, I had stormed at him. But now I understood more: he, too, knew what it was to make monsters.
• 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.
• Beside her, on an alabaster chair, Minos looked old and puffed, like something left dead in the waves. His eyes seized on me as snatcher-birds take fish.
• I had dismissed her coupling with the bull as some perverse whim, but she was not ruled by appetites; she ruled with them instead. When was the last time that I had seen true emotion on her face? I recalled now that moment on her childbed when she had cried out, her face twisted with urgency, that the monster must live... Since then too, one of her brothers had learned to raise the dead, the other to tame dragons, and her sister had transformed Scylla. No one spoke of Pasiphaë anymore. Now, at a stroke, she made her fading star shine again. All the world would tell the story of the queen of Crete, maker and mother of the great flesh-eating bull.
• I watched her dance, arms curving like wings, her strong young legs in love with their own motion. 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.
• My brother, Ariadne had called it. But this creature had not been made for any family. It was my sister’s triumph, her ambition made flesh, her whip to use against Minos. In thanks, it would know no comrade, no lover. It would never see the sun, never take a free step. There was nothing it might ever have in the world but hatred and darkness and its teeth.
• I looked into his good face. Not good because it was handsome, but because it was itself, like fine metal, tempered and beaten for strength. Two monsters we had fought side by side, and he had not wavered.
• “It is funny,” she said, “that even after all this time, you still believe you should be rewarded, just because you have been obedient. I thought you would have learned that lesson in our father’s halls. None shrank and simpered as you did, and yet great Helios stepped on you all the faster, because you were already crouched at his feet.”.. “Let me tell you a truth about Helios and all the rest. 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 could scarcely take them in. She hated our family? She had always seemed to me their distillation, a glittering monument to our blood’s vain cruelty. Yet it was true what she said: nymphs were allowed to work only through the power of others.
• He spoke so softly only a god could have heard. “I was waiting for you. Say but one word, and I am gone.” <> It took me a moment to understand. I had not thought him so bold. But of course he was. Artist, creator, inventor, the greatest the world had known. Timidity creates nothing.
• Perhaps that is no surprise, poets like such symmetries: Witch Circe skilled at spinning spells and threads alike, at weaving charms and cloths. Who am I to spoil an easy hexameter? But any wonder in my cloth comes from that loom and the mortal who made it. Even after so many centuries, its joints are strong, and when the shuttle slides through the warp, the scent of cedar fills the air.
• I mourned for that sweet boy’s death, but I mourned more for Daedalus, winging doggedly onwards, dragging that desperate grief behind him. It was Hermes who told me, of course, sipping my wine, his feet upon my hearth. I closed my eyes, to find that impression I had made of Daedalus’ face. I wished then that we had conceived a child together, to be some comfort to him. But that was a young and silly thought: as if children are sacks of grain, to be substituted one for another.
• 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.
• It was a little like spell-work, I thought, for your hands must be busy, and your mind sharp and free. Yet my favorite part was not the loom at all, but the making of the dyes. I went hunting for the best colors, madder root and saffron, the scarlet kermes bug and the wine-dark murex from the sea, and alum powder to hold them fast in the wool.
• 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.
• (Medea:) Each of her features alone was nothing, her nose too sharp, her chin over-strong. Yet together they made a whole like the heart of a flame. You could not look away. <> Her eyes were clinging to me as if they would peel me.
• I believed that he was a proper prince. He had the trick of speaking like one, rolling words like great boulders, lost in the details of his own legend.
• I helped Prometheus, I reminded myself. But it sounded pathetic even to my ears. How long would I cling to that handful of minutes, trying to cover myself as if with some threadbare blanket?
• But word had spread among the gods that Aiaia was a good place to send difficult daughters. A dryad arrived who had fled her intended husband. Two stone-faced oreads followed, exiled from their mountains. Now whenever I tried to cast a spell, all I could hear was rattling bracelets.
• “That is absurd,” I said. “They would run screaming.” <> “Nymphs always do,” he said. “But I’ll tell you a secret: they are terrible at getting away.” <> At a feast on Olympus such a jest would have been followed by a roar of laughter. Hermes waited now, grinning like a goat.
• I could not stop smiling. The fragility of mortals bred kindness and good grace. They knew how to value friendship and an open hand.
• The captain stepped back and spat at the floor. The jellied glob quivered on the stone. The drop of sweat slid onwards, carving its slimy furrow. A sow shrieked in the yard. Convulsively, I swallowed. My throat clicked. I felt a space open in me. The sleep-spell I had been going to say was gone, dried up, I could not have cast it even if I wanted to. But I did not want to.
• It was not desire, not even its barest scrapings. It was a sort of rage, a knife I used upon myself. I did it to prove my skin was still my own. And did I like the answer I found?
• No sign of brothers or fathers or sons, no vengeance that would follow after. If I were valuable to anyone, I would not be allowed to live alone.
• I knew he meant it. He was not a pious man, but the seeking out of things hidden, this was his highest worship. <> There were answers in me. I felt them, buried deep as last year’s bulbs, growing fat. Their roots tangled with those moments I had spent against the wall, when my lions were gone, and my spells shut up inside me, and my pigs screamed in the yard.
• I had seen how he could shuck truths from men like oyster shells, how he could pry into a breast with a glance and a well-timed word. So little of the world did not yield to his sounding. In the end, I think the fact that I did not was his favorite thing about me.
• “Let me see if I can remember the list.” He ticked his fingers. “Vengeance. Lust. Hubris. Greed. Power. What have I forgotten? Ah yes, vanity, and pique.” <> “Sounds like a usual day among the gods,” I said. <> He laughed and held up his hand. “It is your divine privilege to say so, my lady. I will only give thanks that many of those gods fought on our side.”
• I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets.
• Now I was a fell witch, proving my power with sty after sty. It reminded me suddenly of those old tests Hermes used to set me. Would I be skimmed milk or a harpy? A foolish gull or a villainous monster? <> Those could not still be the only choices.
• He had a number of inconvenient ideas about loyalty and honor. Every day was a new struggle to yoke him to our purpose, keep him straight in his furrow. Then the best part of him died, and he was even more difficult after that. But as I said, his mother was a goddess, and prophecies hung on him like ocean-weed. He wrestled with matters larger than I will ever understand.”
• And Odysseus, I thought. The spiral shell. Always another curve out of sight... His eyes were bright now, storm-lit. When he talked, he was lawyer and bard and crossroads charlatan at once, arguing his case, entertaining, pulling back the veil to show you the secrets of the world. It was not just his words, though they were clever enough. It was everything together: his face, his gestures, the sliding tones of his voice. I would say it was like a spell he cast, but there was no spell I knew that could equal it.
• He would see down to my bones. He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles’ and Ajax’s. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives.
• I began to know his men a little, those unsteady hearts that he had spoken of, those leaky vessels.
• He never said, What if I go home, and all of it is ash? But I saw the thought in him, living like a second body, and feeding in the dark.
• Odysseus said, “I fell asleep. I did not feel them take the bag from my hand. It was the howling of the winds that woke me. They whirled out of the bag and blew us back as if we had never left. Every league undone. They think I grieve for their dead comrades, and I do. But sometimes it is all I can do not to kill them myself. They have wrinkles, but no wisdom. I took them to war before they could do any of those things that steady a man... I fear I have robbed them not only of their youth but their age as well.”
• I remembered all the hours he had spent at war, managing the fine glass tempers of kings, the sulks of princes, balancing each proud warrior against his fellow... His domestic harmony with me was closer to a sort of rehearsal, I realized. When he sat by the hearth, when he worked in my garden, he was trying to remember the trick of it. How an axe might feel in wood instead of flesh. How he might fit himself to Penelope again, smooth as one of Daedalus’ joints.
• So many closed their eyes and spun fantasies of their wished-for strength. But he was mapped and surveyed, each stone and hummock noted with clear-eyed precision. He measured his gifts to the scruple.
• Even their clothes were faded, the fabric leached and gray. They looked like fish, caught beneath a winter’s skim of ice.
• I did not go easy to motherhood. I faced it as soldiers face their enemies, girded and braced, sword up against the coming blows. Yet all my preparations were not enough.
• My whole life, I had waited for tragedy to find me. I never doubted that it would, for I had desires and defiance and powers more than others thought I deserved, all the things that draw the thunderstroke. A dozen times grief had scorched, but its fire had never burned through my skin. My madness in those days rose from a new certainty: that at last, I had met the thing the gods could use against me.
• His mortality was always with me, constant as a second beating heart.
• She struck the room, tall and straight and sudden-white, a talon of lightning in the midnight sky. Her horse-hair helmet brushed the ceiling. Her mirror armor threw off sparks. The spear in her hand was long and thin, its keen edge limned in firelight. She was burning certainty, and before her all the shuffling and stained dross of the world must shrink away. Zeus’ bright and favorite child, Athena.
• But Athena had no babe, and she never would. Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.
• I could hear myself panting a little. The weight of those spells was dragging at my neck like a yoke. They were too great to stand by themselves, and hour after hour I would have to carry them with me, brace them up with my will, and renew them in full each month. Three days it would take me. One to regather all those pieces of the island, beach and grove and meadow, scale and feather and fur. Another day to mix them. A third of utmost concentration to draw out the stink of death from the drops of blood I hoarded.
• I used to do small spells in his presence, hoping one might catch his eye. But he never showed even the faintest interest. Now I saw why. Witchcraft transforms the world. He wanted only to join it.
• He was proud of himself, bright in his new-forged plans. How easily those words tumbled from him, safe, my father. I felt myself running with swift, clear rage.
• through a thousand tributaries until they were brought to the place where its stream ran beneath the very bottom of the sea itself... Where the two waters met they did not mingle, but made a sort of membrane, viscous as a jellyfish. Through it, you could watch the glimmers of phosphorescence in the ocean’s dark, and if you pressed your hand to it, you could feel the deep water on the other side, shockingly cold.
• Then the darkness parted, and he came. Huge he was, white and gray, burned onto the depths like an afterimage of the sun. His silent wings rippled, rills of current flowing off their tips.
• For sixteen years, I had pushed the thought aside. Telegonus made it easy, his wild babyhood filled with Athena’s threats, then the tantrums, his blooming youth and all the messy details of life that he trailed behind him every day.. The hills and trees before me, the worms and lions, stones and tender buds, Daedalus’ loom, all wavered as if they were a fraying dream. Beneath them was the place I truly dwelt, a cold eternity of endless grief.
• So many stubborn wills that must be harnessed again and again to his purpose, so many foolish hearts that had to be led daily away from their hopes to his. No mouth could carry all that persuasion. There must be shortcuts, and so he found them. It might even have been a pleasure of sorts, to squash some little complaining soul who dared to stand in the way of the Best of the Greeks.
• “I have brothers too,” I said. “Do you know what they would do if I were in their power?” <> We stood on his father’s tomb, yet still we fought that same old fight. Gods and fear, gods and fear.
• His face was still taut with that guilty attendance. My boy who had presided so skillfully over a boatload of sailors now hovered, watching like a dog, hoping for any morsel of forgiveness.
• “There was a time we shared every confidence,” he said. “We plotted each night’s strategy against the suitors together, if she should come down or not, speak haughtily or conciliate, if I should bring out the good wine, if we should stage for them some confrontation.
• I pitied him, but if I were honest, I envied him as well. Telegonus and I had never had such closeness to lose. <> “Then my father came home and all of that was wiped away. He was like a summer storm, lightning bright across a pale sky. When he was there, everything else faded.”
• On and on he would have gone, if Athena had not intervened. <> And what of me? How long would I have gone on filling my sty, if Odysseus had not come?
• I went back to my room and listened to them talking about the boat, the food, the most recent storm. The tonic of ordinary things.
• I felt a pang of embarrassment: Telemachus and Telegonus. I knew how it looked to have named my son that, like a dog who scratches outside a door when it cannot come in. I wanted to explain that I had never thought they would know each other, that his name had been intended for me alone. Born far away,
• “I am from Sparta. We know about old soldiers there. The trembling hands, the startling from sleep. The man who spills his wine every time the trumpets blow. My husband’s hands were steady as a blacksmith’s, and when the trumpets sounded, he was first to the harbor scanning the horizon. The war did not break him; it made him more himself. At Troy he found at last a scope to equal his abilities. Always a new scheme, a new plot, a new disaster to avert.”
• I had wondered why she was not more jealous of me. I understood now. I was not the goddess who had taken her husband. <> “Gods pretend to be parents,” I said, “but they are children, clapping their hands and shouting for more.”
• What had I been thinking? My past was not some game, some adventure tale. It was the ugly wrack that storms left rotten on the shore. It was as bad as Odysseus’.
• He reminded her of her cousin Castor, with his eagerness and good humor, his way of easing those around him. “Odysseus drew the world to him,” she said. “Telegonus runs after, shaping as he goes, like a river carving a channel.” <> It pleased me more than I could say to hear her praise him.
• Yet it also made a sort of sense to me. Aeëtes wanted an heir, and there was none more like him than Medea. She had grown up trained around his cruelty, and in the end it seemed she had not learned how to hold another shape.
• “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.
• There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line.
• But there was a contained quality to Telemachus, a quiet assurance that made him companionable without being intrusive. The creature he most reminded me of, I realized, was my lion. They had the same upright dignity, the same steady gaze with deep-set humor. Even the same earthbound grace, which pursued their own ends while I pursued mine.
• I drew my divinity up, cold and bracing around me, and went to open the door.
• I would help him forget. I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.
• I was breaking to pieces. I knew what I would see when I looked at him, his eager, pleading hope. He wanted to go. He had always wanted to go, from the moment he was born into my arms. I had let Penelope stay on my island so she would not lose her son. I would lose mine instead.
• “You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure you do not dishonor me.” <> “I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”
• I ran my hand across the lion’s clawed foot, felt the sticky sheen of the wax. <> “Do you always make beautiful things for those you are angry with?” <> “No,” he said. “Only you.”
• I passed a pear tree drifted with white blossoms. A fish splashed in the moonlit river. With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. 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.
• “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.” “It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said. “Yes.” His voice was sharp. “It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.”
• “Your mother,” I said. “Do you think she’ll be angry at us?” He snorted. “No,” he said. “She likely knew before we did.” “I would not be surprised if we come back and find her a witch.”
• “Ah. It was a guess. Something Odysseus said about you once.” “Which was?” “That he had never met a god who enjoyed their divinity less.”
• Overhead the constellations dip and wheel. My divinity shines in me like the last rays of the sun before they drown in the sea. I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. <> All my life I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal’s voice, let me have the rest. I lift the brimming bowl to my lips and drink.