Written words speak your mind

The abrasion is still healing and I am stuck with frequent applications of glop for the next week, but the infection in my eye has begun to clear remarkably and it makes a real difference. No wonder Stewart's Merlin traveled so successfully as an itinerant eye doctor, like Marcus Flavius Aquila three centuries before him. They can't exist in the same continuity if Sutcliff's Arthurian novels are to grow out of her Roman ones, but they are part of the same constellation in my head, the same nets of allusion. I had forgotten the touch of Kipling in The Hollow Hills (1973), in the lineage of the sword which Stewart does not call Excalibur: "It was easy to believe that the old smith, Weland himself, who was old before the Romans came, might have made this last artifact before he faded with the other small gods of wood and stream and river, into the misty hills, leaving the crowded valleys to the bright gods of the Middle Sea." I hope I noticed before how she makes Merlin double for the Fisher King, even to wounding him—though it is not the cause of his childlessness, which he chose long ago—in the thigh. Because I am re-reading her romantic suspense as well as her Arthuriana, I have been thinking for a couple of nights about a passage that pulled me up short when I discovered it in My Brother Michael (1959), where I hadn't remembered it at all:

I said, "It's this confounded country. It does things to one—mentally and physically and I suppose morally. The past is so living and the present so intense and the future so blooming imminent. The light seems to burn life into you twice as intensely as anywhere else I've known. I suppose that's why the Greeks did what they did so miraculously, and why they could stay themselves through twenty generations of slavery that would have crushed any other race on earth. You come here thinking you're going to look at a lot of myth-haunted ruins and picturesque peasants and you find that . . ." I stopped.

"That what?"

"No. I'm talking piffle."

"It's good piffle. Go on. What do you find?"

"You find that the tomb of Michael Lester is as moving and important as the 'tomb of Agamemnon' at Mycenae, or Byron or Venizelos or Alexander. He, and the men like him, are a part of the same picture." I stopped, and then said helplessly, "Greece. Damn it, what is it that it does to one?"

He was silent a moment, then he said, "I think the secret is that it belongs to all of us—to us of the West. We've learned to think in its terms, and to live in its laws. It's given us almost everything that our world has that is worth while. Truth, straight thinking, freedom, beauty. It's our second language, our second line of thought, our second country. We all have our own country—and Greece."

I can't agree with this passage—I have no second country, unless an imaginary one, and while it makes a change that the characters admire the present rather than just the past of Greece, besides my professional side-eye on the miraculous uniqueness of the culture, since the last time I read this novel I have become even more alienated from invocations of the inheritance of the West. And yet even if I missed most of it in school, I can't say that I grew up outside the Western canon. I've just been quoting the echoes of two empires that I got without effort toward either. I named my cat after a great trickster according to the Odyssey and Shakespeare. Here he is, grooming beautifully under the lawn chair currently residing in the summer kitchen. Even as a child, I never confused Mary Stewart with Mary Renault, but you see why they, too, constellated in my brain.