I haven’t read a book cover to cover in a long time. It’s a little embarrassing, as someone who read voraciously when I was younger — an entire book in a single day, sometimes a few hours. Now I tend to pick up old favorites and thumb to any old page, read a handful of pages over breakfast or in an empty stretch of day-off afternoon. Whatever I have attention for.
Today I finished Madeline Miller’s Circe. Those who had to read the classics in school will likely remember Circe the way she appears in Homer’s Odyssey: an island-bound sorceress, who first turns Odysseus’ crew into pigs, but relents after he confronts her and allows the men to stay on her island of Aiaia for a year. There is so much I could say about this book, from the depth of Circe as a character to its relation to and departure from myth (I’m a bit of a Greek myth obsessive). But I keep coming back to Circe’s island, and her divinity.
In Miller’s book, Circe is exiled to Aiaia by her father, the sun god Helios, after admitting to using her powers of witchcraft on a fellow nymph. It’s a punishment fit for an immortal: while her island has forests and hills for her to explore, and her house is beautiful and never empty of food, she cannot leave its shores. She’s destined to spend most of eternity alone, except for rare visitors. Let’s be clear: visitors in ancient stories are seldom the kind or welcome sort, and Circe is not spared in that sense. There is a reason she begins to turn men into pigs. But she doesn’t start that way: she starts eager for any news beyond Aiaia, and offering help (however weary) and sustenance (however simple) to those who come asking.
A few days ago, a friend offered to run an errand and stop by my mother’s house, where I’ve been staying since coming safely out of quarantine. In many ways I’m lucky: we don’t lack for food, and there’s a yard big enough to walk around. But the house is on a main road, and I don’t currently drive, which means I can’t help out my family like I’d like to. Taking a walk is risky at best with so many cars, and because our county's rate of infection is the state's highest. All this considered, I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing a friendly face outside my too-familiar walls. So imagine my delight, the way my heart leapt, seeing not one but four friends traipse into the driveway at midday like merry messengers. It was mixed with a little fear, primal, my body’s natural reaction to seeing anyone not of my household these days. This, I thought, is what Circe must have felt, the first time a ship dragged up onto Aiaia’s shores.
Our friends had our bag of errands, bless them, but it was an even better prize just to see them in the flesh, standing the required six feet away. The weather was good for once, so we decided we could sit out in the yard with them, all of us prudently masked. I didn’t realize how long we had been out there until my mother poked her head out and asked, with that worried tone mothers have, whether any of them wanted coffee, something to eat. Within minutes she brought out a tray and slid it onto the grass between us. We talked and laughed and swapped news for another hour at least, keeping our mandated distance, moving with the sun across the yard.
When they finally left, I felt strangely lost. The still water of my days had felt rare ripples for a few hours, and now all had settled again. My mother’s delicate espresso tasses sat abandoned in the grass, their daintiness thrown into shadow against the not-yet-spring of new moss and old pine. Something unnameable bloomed in my chest to see it. So much weight in such delicate things. All my longing, balanced on a fragile rim.
Later that same day, maybe sensing my heartache, my mother suggested we go for a drive to a quiet coastal town where she knew we could walk undisturbed. It was the first time I had ventured further than a few blocks from where I was sleeping in a month. Anxiety battered my ribcage with every step from the car. Every time I saw a person approaching, I flinched, and hated it. My breath felt shallow behind my mask. Every time my mother pointed out a flower or a slope down to the water I barely answered, tensed for possible dangers up the road.
My moments of respite came when there was no one else in sight. All I could look at was what was in front of me. A curve of road through bare unbloomed trees, their limbs crisp against clear sunlit sky. A marshy expanse, a lone egret standing in the slow-moving current. I felt, in those deserted tableaux, a wonder that I can only relate to childhood: look at this color, this shape, look at the way the world is. It felt like cold water slicing through me, waking me up. I felt a strange relief: even as so much of our world and our daily lives are dramatically changed, there is plenty that doesn’t change, that continues without us. The trees waiting to bloom, and the egret, and the waters flowing through the marsh. If only I could be a thing like that, I thought. If only our lives didn’t have to change quite so much.
That night, I picked up Circe again. I came to a passage where Circe is looking over Aiaia, its every detail she knows so well, from the poplar trees to the cormorants circling the waves. “Mortals like to name such natural wonders changeless, eternal, but the island was always changing, that was the truth, flowing endlessly through its generations,” she muses. “Three hundred years and more had passed since I had come. … Even the cliffs were different, carved by the rain and wind, by the claws of countless scrabbling lizards, by the seeds that stuck and sprouted in their cracks. Everything was united by the steady rise and fall of nature’s breath. Everything except for me.”
I stared at the page. Truly it felt like witchcraft, Circe coming through the pages to slap me in the face. At first it seemed a reproach for me: of course things change, don’t be stupid, you are not the center of the world. But then I reread that last line, felt the yearning in it. The ache to move, act, breathe differently when you’re unable to. Isn’t there freedom, and privilege, in being able to change at all?
Reading Circe, you get the sense that the titular goddess sees her eternal life as one of endurance and suffering. But narrators are unreliable: it is my favorite thing about them. They tell us their story, but they tell us more in how they act. Circe is tough, no question — she has to be. But she has an undeniable soft spot for mortals: for their company, their love even. Over the course of the story, it is pointed out several times that Circe’s voice sounds like a mortal’s — an undesirable similarity for a goddess. As the book goes on, you get the sense that closeness to humanity might actually be her strength. Each piece of news she gets from the world beyond Aiaia, each visitor she offers a cup of wine in her halls, affects her deeply one way or another. Even if she can’t change (and that’s not guaranteed), she wants to.
All her longing, balanced on a fragile rim.
I am no goddess; I am hardly in exile. But I don’t think it’s dramatic to say this period of isolation feels eternal. Every day bleeds so easily into the next — they feel like weeks and months of their own. And always, the fear — of anyone outside, of the microscopic thing I can’t see that is taking lives and grinding the gears of the world to a stop. It’s easy to feel like nothing changes, that we will be stuck forever in the mire.
But if Circe saw anything in her centuries-long exile, it is that change happens constantly, and often so slowly that we don’t see it. After a tumble from the window took an entire vine off my houseplant two months ago, there’s a tiny push of growth at the stem. My anxiety is chronic and my bad days are still bad, but the constant pressure in my chest from the first two weeks of reading the news has dwindled. I can’t promise that all change is good, but it happens. And that means that this moment in time is changing, too. One day we will wake up and the world will look different than it does right now.
So we savor the small divergences of our days — friendly faces, patches of sunlight, a chore finished. We do what we can do. We trust that the wave of change we can’t see yet is coming, and we hope that we can push it to the right shores.
May it take much less than three hundred years.
(Stay safe, stay healthy, stay inside.)