I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.
I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.
It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a mans.
It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.
It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.
No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.
Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.
There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.
What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.
And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.
You don't think - not possibly - not as a mere hundredth chance - there might be things that are real though we can't see them? … If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?
And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.
As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.
But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.
Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.
I have seen something like it happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped out cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face - friends for a moment - and then at once enemies again and forever.
I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything.
I was with book, as a woman is with child.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories