Reread for a seminar discussion November 2023. Updated review (perhaps) to come. I see new things in this text each time. This was my second time reading a copy I owned, and I could see what I underlined a few years ago; I think I understand the text a little better now, and I erased some of my marginal markings with a little laughter at eighteen-year-old me. I am sure I will do the same in the future to the things I wrote this time.

This time I was thinking about: Orual as Ungit. Monergism vs. synergism. Anti-suicide. St. Augustine. Womanhood. The purpose of philosophy. The gods as aspects of the one god. The changes and continuities in individual identity throughout years.

'you also shall be psyche'

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quote list collected last time

Spoiler

➳ Being free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I will accuse the gods.

➳ Greek wisdom does not give [the Greeks] the boldness to die. Much less does it give them understanding of holy things. They demand to see things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book. [But it] is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

➳ It was when I was happiest that I longed the most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, with the wind and the sunshine... because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying "come!" But I couldn't (not yet) come... It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage.

➳ The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.

➳ The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.

➳ The horror was a sickening discord, a rasping together of two worlds, like two bits of a broken bone. For the world had broken in pieces and Psyche and I were not in the same piece.

➳ To take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots, and then to make of it a tool, a weapon... I begin to think I never knew you. Whatever comes after, something that was between us dies here.

➳ He rejected, denied, answered, and (worst of all) he knew, all that I had thought, done, or been. A Greek verse says that the gods cannot change the past. But is this true? He made it to be as if, from the beginning, I had known... If the gods can indeed change the past, why do they never do so in mercy?

➳ They would give me no clear sign, though I begged for it. I had to guess. And because I guessed wrong they punished me... I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will neither go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us do. For that too would be endurable. But to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them... Why must holy places be dark places?

➳ The only difference [between dreams and reality] is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

➳ The voice of the god had not changed in all those years, but I had.

➳ Why should they meet us face to face till we have faces?

➳"Are the gods not just?"
"Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?"

➳ The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming.

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?