murkiness of densely shifting shadows.
I found myself slowing my steps.
“Walk with me,” he threw over his shoulder. “Now, one of the things I find so boring about this modern age of yours is all the nonsense about women being discriminated against throughout history, beaten down by the male hierarchy, forced to do housework while their men achieve greatness. Never believe it. The Muses were all women, if you recall; Orpheus was the odd one out. But the Muses were virgins. Well, not in the technical sense of the word—I had to divert myself somehow between all the lyre-strumming bits, and now and then they did stray into some transient unions of their own. But they were never devoted wives and never committed mothers, and all their time, all their passion, was dedicated solely to their art.”
It had become so dark I could not see the shelves at all. I followed his voice blindly. Gravel or perhaps seashells crunched under my feet, and I stifled a cry when the flinty wing of some swift nocturnal creature brushed my cheek.
“Now, as always, you have a choice. You can spend your days baking cookies for your offspring, or—as ever through the ages—you can become a madwoman, a nomad, a warrior, a saint. But if you do decide to follow the way of the few, you must remember this: Whenever you come to a fork in the road, always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you. Here, turn around.”
He stopped with such abruptness that my face was pressed into his jacket in the instant before I felt his arms grasp my shouldersand swing me about. I could see nothing at first—it was so black I thought for a moment that I had forgotten to open my eyes—but I had a sure sense that we were in the library no longer: the darkness, though impenetrable, breathed of vastness, and the ceiling with its dead electric lamps had long given way to the cosmic circling of infinity. Then slowly, out of the void, a steady light emerged, and another, and another, until lights were floating all around me—numerous but not endless, a thousand sparks, two thousand perhaps, setting the emptiness aglow as they drew their fiery trajectories across the night, until the night itself was relieved of its oppressive blackness and other, paler lights shimmered in a faint haze of lesser constellations beyond.
“There,” he whispered. His breath was in my hair; his right hand, slipping off my shoulder, was pointing into the luminous depths. “The lights of the earth—both men and women, of course, but look at the women: in the eyes of the masses, nothing but a gathering of perversions and monstrosities, of recluses and harlots. Sappho over there—my Tenth Muse, they called her, a heartache of mine—just a handful of her lines survive today and, oh, if only you knew what beauty has been lost . . . Curious, is it not, that so many of them shared Sappho’s tastes and predilections—Tsvetaeva, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, numerous others . . . And here are the nuns, the mystics, the philosophers, the odd and the solitary and the sickly ones, the ones who never married—Teresa of Ávila, Hypatia, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson . . . And don’t forget all the wild ones as well as the quiet ones who gently and unswervingly eschewed convention—the two Georges, Sand and Eliot, come to mind. And most of themarried ones were childless, and of the ones who did have children, so many became what the world would brand ‘unnatural mothers’—take Akhmatova and Colette, who sent their children away to be raised by relatives, or Tsvetaeva, who let her daughter starve to death in an orphanage. Heartless? Most certainly, by any human standards—but they lived and died by other, higher standards, the divine standards of art.”
His right hand was still pointing as he talked, but his left had begun to stroke my neck, ever so lightly. Waves of glowing flame swirled about me, through me,
I found myself slowing my steps.
“Walk with me,” he threw over his shoulder. “Now, one of the things I find so boring about this modern age of yours is all the nonsense about women being discriminated against throughout history, beaten down by the male hierarchy, forced to do housework while their men achieve greatness. Never believe it. The Muses were all women, if you recall; Orpheus was the odd one out. But the Muses were virgins. Well, not in the technical sense of the word—I had to divert myself somehow between all the lyre-strumming bits, and now and then they did stray into some transient unions of their own. But they were never devoted wives and never committed mothers, and all their time, all their passion, was dedicated solely to their art.”
It had become so dark I could not see the shelves at all. I followed his voice blindly. Gravel or perhaps seashells crunched under my feet, and I stifled a cry when the flinty wing of some swift nocturnal creature brushed my cheek.
“Now, as always, you have a choice. You can spend your days baking cookies for your offspring, or—as ever through the ages—you can become a madwoman, a nomad, a warrior, a saint. But if you do decide to follow the way of the few, you must remember this: Whenever you come to a fork in the road, always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you. Here, turn around.”
He stopped with such abruptness that my face was pressed into his jacket in the instant before I felt his arms grasp my shouldersand swing me about. I could see nothing at first—it was so black I thought for a moment that I had forgotten to open my eyes—but I had a sure sense that we were in the library no longer: the darkness, though impenetrable, breathed of vastness, and the ceiling with its dead electric lamps had long given way to the cosmic circling of infinity. Then slowly, out of the void, a steady light emerged, and another, and another, until lights were floating all around me—numerous but not endless, a thousand sparks, two thousand perhaps, setting the emptiness aglow as they drew their fiery trajectories across the night, until the night itself was relieved of its oppressive blackness and other, paler lights shimmered in a faint haze of lesser constellations beyond.
“There,” he whispered. His breath was in my hair; his right hand, slipping off my shoulder, was pointing into the luminous depths. “The lights of the earth—both men and women, of course, but look at the women: in the eyes of the masses, nothing but a gathering of perversions and monstrosities, of recluses and harlots. Sappho over there—my Tenth Muse, they called her, a heartache of mine—just a handful of her lines survive today and, oh, if only you knew what beauty has been lost . . . Curious, is it not, that so many of them shared Sappho’s tastes and predilections—Tsvetaeva, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, numerous others . . . And here are the nuns, the mystics, the philosophers, the odd and the solitary and the sickly ones, the ones who never married—Teresa of Ávila, Hypatia, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson . . . And don’t forget all the wild ones as well as the quiet ones who gently and unswervingly eschewed convention—the two Georges, Sand and Eliot, come to mind. And most of themarried ones were childless, and of the ones who did have children, so many became what the world would brand ‘unnatural mothers’—take Akhmatova and Colette, who sent their children away to be raised by relatives, or Tsvetaeva, who let her daughter starve to death in an orphanage. Heartless? Most certainly, by any human standards—but they lived and died by other, higher standards, the divine standards of art.”
His right hand was still pointing as he talked, but his left had begun to stroke my neck, ever so lightly. Waves of glowing flame swirled about me, through me,
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