In this book, we go through the story of the first child of Perses and Helios: Circe (meaning hawk, or falcon). Circe is not pretty enough to get her parents’ attention, and even her voice is a target of complaints by fellow nymphs and titans. Later on, we understand why: her voice is like a mortal’s, too strident and annoying for divine ears.
Circe holds the same power as her siblings, the one of witchcraft; but only she is punished for it, sent to an exile that lasts centuries. According to Odysseus, that meets her during such exile, he has never seen a god who hated their divinity as Circe did, and this is what I believe to be the arch of the story: mortality.
Many times she is faced with death, and many times she envies mortals for it: her memory fades away, the centuries go by, and nothing changes. Finally, at the end of the book, Circe chooses to drink pharmaka, the flowers that originated from Chronos’ blood, in an attempt to turn herself mortal. She imagines her whole life (and death) ahead of her: the children she would have, the places she would meet with her mortal loved one, without ever fearing losing him for eternity or forgetting. She would not be left behind.
The book ends with Circe drinking the pharmaka, hoping her wish comes true: “ I have a mortal’s voice, let me have the rest.”. We do not know if it does.
What can I get from this book
Would one choose to be immortal?
I do not think so. I believe mortality is what makes our existence worth it: the end of our lives creeping on us, the burden of death hanging over our heads. Our lives are stupid fragile, and “a breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. […] If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live beneath such a burden of doom?”.
The frailty of life is what keeps us going, it’s what makes us think about our actions and, paradoxically, it’s what comforts us and lets us know that, in some decades, it won’t matter.
But I think that, most of all, life’s brevity is what makes us enjoy it the most. We do not cross the same river twice, and that is incredible, amazing, astonishing.
“Circe, he says, it will be alright […] and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
