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I feel a bit overwhelmed attempting to write about Circe as a book because there is almost too much that I want to say about it. Madeline Miller’s book tackles themes as far-reaching as the effects and weight of time and ages passing, of the overwhelming terror of parenthood, of love and loss, of madness in lust and love, of the struggle of being a woman in a patriarchal world, of the pressure and isolation within one’s own family, and probably tons of other things that I might’ve even missed. The titular character, over the course of the book’s sprawling but taut nearly 400 pages weaves her way in and out of some of Greek antiquity’s greatest myths in a way that finds proverbial wisdom in each one that often wasn’t there in the story’s original telling. The story begins with Circe coming into her own as a Greek goddess in the wake of war with the new gods of Olympus, and it’s through this that she slowly learns of her power and of the harshness of the world. Perhaps the greatest reminder of both of those lies within the story of the fisherman, Glaucos, whose love interest, Scylla, Circe turns into a sea monster because she loved Glaucos, and in the ensuing punishment handed down from Zeus she is ridiculed by her brother, Aeëtes, who up until this point had been one of the only characters in the novel she truly related to and could confide in. In the end, Circe is forced to live on an island in the Mediterranean alone as punishment for her crime. In the ensuing years, Circe is forced to witness the birth of the Minotaur and the subsequent pain it and her sister has caused, the tragedy of Dedalus’ son Icarus, and she is visited by a series of travelers, who after assaulting her sexually, she proceeds to turn men who come to her island into pigs, until, finally Odysseus from Homer’s The Odyssey arrives and she falls for him, conceiving a child. Through all of these events and tragedies, we see the effect of time, how growth and age, and the coming and going of relationships turn her once green and bright perception of the world into one of guarded misanthropy. Of all of the themes to pull from within the story, I feel, the ones that stuck with me the most and caused a genuine effect on me were the ones about time and parenthood. I am, by no means, a parent, but I do have nephews that are slowly working their way through their teens, and I have friends who have children, and in my job, I work with children on a daily basis, and it was in the scenes with Telegonus that I felt the weight of all of that time breathing a new life into an already emotional story. Because, although Circe intends to keep Telegonus safe, and happy, she knows that’s not possible. She realizes it slowly through the lies she tells about his father, Odysseus, who although she sees as a great man, she views through retrospection as a more complex, more violent, and aggressive person than she originally saw him at the time of their romance. Instead, whenever she speaks the harsh truth about Telegonus’s father, Telegonus insists that she must be mistaken, that his father is honorable. She sees in his urge for clear right and wrongs the same fault in her own view of the world at a young age and how that wounded her again and again as the years go on. This is something that comes up near the end of the novel when Telegonus finally finds out that Circe is sisters with Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur, and Telegonus asks about who else she knows, including Scylla. Again and again, throughout the story, old wounds keep digging themselves up to the surface and force Circe to relive the pain of a life that has lasted centuries. In reading this I couldn’t help but think of Nietzche’s theory of Eternal Recurrence, of which he writes, in Aphorism 341 “The Greatest Weight”: "What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' "Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?" In the end, Circe chooses a mortal life, and to live out her days with eventual death, something that has never been a part of her life up until this point. Miller writes in the waning moments, “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.” I don’t know what to say about those thoughts, both Miller’s and Nietzsche’s and how I feel that they are related, but I completely feel that they are because of what they say about time and the weight of it, the constant digging up of the past, the inescapability of all of the mistakes that’ve led to this point and whether or not they would be worth existing through again. Honestly, I wish I had more time because I feel like there’s plenty more I could write about this book and all it says to me, but I’ll stop here because I’m probably well past what is reasonable for somebody to read in one sitting at this point.
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