Epictetus, Discourses and Enchiridion

If Socrates is the father of Western philosophy, then, to quote HIMYM, Epictetus is the weird, survivalist uncle who lives in a cabin with a shotgun... of philosophy. A freed slave with a bum leg, Epictetus taught Stoic philosophy around the turn of the first century, AD. (That's right, bitches, we're out of BC.) His take on Stoicism is relatively orthodox, but his presentation is far from it, mercilessly berating his (mostly imagined) interlocutors. Like other Stoics, he places little value on "externals," objects and events that originate outside of one's own mind. Since we have no ability to control other people or the caprices of nature, there is no point in trying, and we should focus instead on what we do have control over: our judgments of those externals. Or as Hamlet says, "There is neither good or bad, but thinking makes it so." (That's a real quote this time.)


Negative Externalities

Indeed, Epictetus doesn't believe in words like "good" or "bad" when they are attributed to externals. To him, good is the right judgment of an external, and bad is the wrong judgment. If, as he says, someone tells you that three equals four, their assertion is not bad in and of itself; all that is bad is that they believe something that is untrue, and it would be bad for you to believe it, also. “The essence of good and evil consists in the condition of our character. And externals are the means by which our character finds its particular good and evil. It finds its good by not attaching value to the means. Correct judgements about externals make our character good, as perverse or distorted ones make it bad.”

From here, we come to the second important aspect of Epictetus' philosophy: virtue. The gist of Stoic philosophy is that one must live a virtuous life by behaving in accordance with nature. Though we are not supposed to place value on externals, this does not mean, as Ivan Karamazov says, that everything is permitted. We are still to seek the good, which is located in the "condition of our character." For example, if one with a poor grasp of Epictetus were to cheat on his wife, he might say that marriage does not matter because it is an external and his wife does not matter because she is a mortal. But believing cheating to be permitted is as bad as saying three equals four because it is just as unnatural: one would not, as Epictetus says, grab food off a dinner guest's plate just because the food is communal, nor would one throw another out of his seat at the theater just because seating is open. Moreover, to cheat on one's wife shows that externals have not be adequately devalued: while he asserts that she has no value, he also asserts that the woman he cheated with has more value than his integrity.

Socrates

Epictetus' writings (he actually never wrote anything, but his lectures and diatribes were transcribed by his student, Arrian) date from around the turn of the first century, AD, half a millennium after the death of Socrates. In that time, he has been transformed through Ovidian metamorphosis from the father of Western philosophy to a Grecian hero in his own right. Epictetus' style of lecturing could be called Socratic, as much of the Discourses feature him questioning people as to their beliefs about externals (though I don't remember Socrates calling people idiots).

Moreover, he refers to Socrates' acceptance of death as the ultimate triumph of Stoic philosophy. By accepting his fate as outside of his control, he did not allow himself to be troubled by externals; he was "ready to die," as Epictetus says all philosophers must be. He didn't give up his integrity during his trial by begging for his life, and he didn't go through the unnecessary process of escaping from prison only to go into hiding. (If he escape from prison and couldn't live his life the way he wanted, with his family and his school, what was the point of living?)

Socrates desire to "know himself" is also related to Stoicism: Epictetus features this nice exchange with a made-up person:

“‘But the tyrant will chain–'

What will he chain? Your leg. 

‘He will chop off –' 

What? Your head. What he will never chain or chop off is your integrity. That’s the reason behind the ancient advice to ‘know yourself.’"

Religion

One thing I was not able to find any information on was the possible influence of Christianity on Epictetus' philosophy (edit: I found a French article titled "Le Morale d' Épictète et le Christianism"that was published in a German journal. I have no plans to read it.) as many of his views are compatible with Christianity. For example, whereas the Bible would say that it is imperative to follow God's will, Epictetus clarifies and says that we should follow God's will because it is an external, something out of our control. Matthew 6:19 says not to keep treasures on earth where "moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal," and Epictetus agrees, saying that "we get angry [with thieves] because we place too high a premium on things that they can steal."

There's an idea in academia called Stigler's Law of Eponymy that says things are never named after the first person to discover them. Stigler's Law (which, ironically, is an example of Stigler's Law, having been first proposed by a sociologist named Robert K. Merton) can be attributed to ideas that are discovered by one person and popularized by another, or are discovered once and subsequently rediscovered.

What's been so rewarding about this reading list is seeing ideas being discovered and rediscovered independently throughout the years. To me, without any knowledge of the influence of Epictetus on early Christianity or vice versa, I would be happy to read this as two philosophical schools independently (re)discovering a universal truth.


Death

Somewhere, in one of the books I read, a philosopher said that the goal of philosophy is to remove the fear of death (cf. DeLillo's White Noise and this hilariously relevant study). Epictetus has probably had the most to say about this of any other philosopher so far, and his arguments are powerful and coherent. "I am not Father Time; I'm a human being, a part of a whole, like an hour in a day. Like the hour I must abide my time, and like the hour, pass."

Death to Epictetus is not only an unavoidable circumstance as it is to, say, Epicurus; it is the culmination of one's life, perhaps even the goal. "Isn't wheat grown for the express purpose of turning brown, and doesn't it turn brown in preparation for being harvested? It is not grown for its own sake... Come, that's actually a curse we put on other crop, that it not be brought to harvest." We are only "beset by anxiety" about death because we are ignorant as to our "true purpose." Life, then, is not about living, but about preparing to die, as the purpose of wheat is to turn brown and be harvested. We are not living "for our own sake," for the sake of having life; and eternal life, in turn, should be more a curse than a dream.

A couple more quotes:

“‘What did we get externals for then?’

To use. 

‘For how long?’ 

For as long as the one who gave them decides.” 

“Make room for other people, it’s their turn to be born, just as you were born, and once born they need a place to live, along with the other necessities of life. If the first people won’t step aside, what’s going to happen? Don’t be so greedy. Aren’t you ever satisfied? Are you determined to make the world more crowded still?”


Reservations

I suppose it is unreasonable to enjoy Epictetus' philosophy so much and then be troubled by these quotes:

“If it is china you like, for instance, say, ‘I am fond of a piece of china.’ [As in, say it condescendingly] When it breaks, then you won’t be as disconcerted. When giving your wife or child a kiss, repeat to yourself, ‘I am kissing a mortal.’ Then you won’t be so distraught if they are taken from you.”

“We can familiarize ourselves with the will of nature by calling to mind our common experiences. When a friend breaks a glass, we are quick to say, ‘Oh, bad luck.’ It’s only reasonable, then, that when a glass of your own breaks, you accept it in the same patient spirit. Moving on to graver things: when somebody’s wife or child dies, to a man we all routinely say, ‘Well, that’s part of life.’ But if one of our own family is involved, then right away it’s ‘Poor, poor me!’”

It follows naturally from the rest of what he's said. Externals are externals, and attaching value to them is wrong; one should go with the flow of nature. Perhaps my problem is that what he considers to be completely within our control is not always so easily restrained. To reference Cicero's On Moral Ends, when Simonides ("or some such person") offered to teach Themistocles the art of memory, he replied that he would rather learn the art of forgetting. That is, though Epictetus is right to say that our reason is the only thing we have control over, I don't believe that that implies we can control everything that crosses our mind. This is the point where Epictetus would call me a bitch and tell me to suck it up and control my impressions, but I stand by it.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Epictetus. We'll return to Stoic philosophy in not too long with Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and I will certainly come back to Epictetus myself in the future. As Robert Dobbin said in his introduction, people are constantly rediscovering Epictetus and his ideas, and for good reason.


Stray Observations

• “Be confident in everything outside the will, and cautious in everything under the will’s control.”
• On tragedy: “For what else are tragedies but the ordeals of people who have come to value externals, tricked out in tragic verse?” Again: “ ‘So in your view great tragedies are merely the result of this – somebody’s “impression?”’ Wherein did Achilles’ tragedy lie? The death of Patroclus? Not at all. It was that he gave in to anger, that he whined about losing a mere woman and lost sight of the fact that he was there not for romance but for war. Those are the genuine human tragedies, the city’s siege and capture – when right judgements are subverted; when thoughts are undermined.” Again: “Behold the birth of tragedy: when idiots come face to face with the vicissitudes of life.”
• “‘But I want my wishes realized, never mind the reason behind them.’ Now, that’s madness, that’s insanity.” 
• On action: “If we are afraid to throw the ball [in a sporting match], or nervous about catching it, then the fun is lost; and how can we preserve our composure when we are uncertain about what next to do? ‘Throw it,’ someone says, ‘Don’t throw it,’ another says, ‘Throw it already!’ says someone else. It turns into a shouting instead of a sporting match.” This is a reference not to action in general, but within the context of having an intimate understanding of Stoic philosophy and the proper actions with regard to externals.
• On the purposes and limitations of practical philosophy: “‘Hey, philosopher, what good did your views do you after all? Look, you’re being hauled off to prison and soon will be beheaded.’ Tell me, what Introduction to Philosophy could I have read that would have saved me from being dragged away if a stronger man grabs me by the cloak?” Erudition is no match for the power of externals. 
• Even though we're 500 years removed from Socrates, the idea of "the end" is still very much alive: “First, tell yourself what you want to be, then act your part accordingly… All our efforts must be directed towards an end, or we will act in vain.” To quote the Avett Brothers: "Decide what to be and go be it.” 
• On the application of philosophy: “This is the cause of everyone’s troubles, the inability to apply common preconceptions to particulars.” Talk about particulars should bring to mind Plato's Forms, and also James Joyce’s comment about Dublin: "In the particular lies the universal."
• On death: “Make room for other people, it’s their turn to be born, just as you were born, and once born they need a place to live, along with the other necessities of life. If the first people won’t step aside, what’s going to happen? Don’t be so greedy. Aren’t you ever satisfied? Are you determined to make the world more crowded still?” 
• “‘Everybody gives me their attention and respect.’ Right, and I pay attention to my blackboard, wiping it, and washing it; and for my oil flask I’ll even drive a nail in the wall. Does that make these things better than me? No – it just means that they are useful to me somehow.” Respect and admiration are not desirable and give no indication of true value or worth.
• A great line about the nature of paradoxes: “What is more paradoxical than cutting into a person’s eye to restore their vision?” 
• “The following are non-sequiturs: ‘I am richer, therefore superior to you’; or ‘I am a better speaker, therefore a better person, than you.’ These statements, on the other hand, are cogent: ‘I am richer than you, therefore my wealth is superior to yours’” In the words of Tyler Durden: You are not your bank account. 
• “The first and most important field of philosophy is the application of principles such as ‘Do not lie.’ Next come the proofs…the third field supports and articulates the proofs, by asking, for example, ‘How does this prove it?... We are preoccupied with the third field and give it all our attention, passing the first by altogether.” Focus on the thing, rather than the meaning of the thing.
• Epictetus: Portrait of a kid who had no friends. “Is it solely at your discretion that you are elevated to office, or invited to a party? No; so it cannot be a dishonour if you are not.” 

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: Part III

Well, it only took about 400 pages, but we've finally arrived at the heart of the story: the murder of Fyodor Karamazov and the trial of Dmitri for his murder. Additionally, we've now had a section dedicated almost exclusively to each of the three brothers: the first part belonged to Alyosha, the second to Ivan, and now it's Dmitri's turn. This section has much more action that philosophy, but don't worry, I've milked enough out of it for a post. Just one note: I know some (one) of you liked me calling Dostoevsky "Dosty," for from this post forward I'll switch to "Dusty," as I found that in one of Nabokov's discussions about Russian authors. It's much cleverer than mine, albeit more mean-spirited. 

Sensualism

With so much focus on Dmitri, we were bound to hear a great deal of sensualist rambling. It's beautiful in its own way, though, like reading bad poetry: its artlessness is evident, but we still feel pangs of understanding in its headstrong sentimentality (cf. every Taylor Swift song). We can also read Dmitri's lines as a primer on constructing sensual characters. 

Sensualists are schemers, men who would rather devise Wile E. Coyote-esque plans than take the path as the crow flies: “Like very many men in such cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he could fly away from this accursed place – he would be altogether regenerated, would enter on a new path.” Again: "He gave himself up to every new idea with passionate enthusiasm." And again: “And perhaps to men of that kind in such circumstances the most impossible, fantastic schemes occur first, and seem most practical.” The fantastical is the practical to them. 

They are jealous: "Now I shall see what she looks like with him.” Again: “Is she cheerful? Is she laughing?” We'll talk a little more of Dmitri's jealousy a bit further down in relation to the narrator's comparison of Dmitri to Othello. 

They are forgiving: “It is hard to imagine what a jealous man can reconcile himself to and overlook, and what he can forgive! The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive.” Forgiveness is no difficult task when they are so disconnected from reality. If situations are never real, they can readily be forgiven because there is nothing to forgive; how easy would it be to forgive a fictional character, knowing that their crimes will never recur or hurt anyone in the real world?
 

Doubt

In my previous posts, I've neglected the significance of chapter divisions within the novel. Though I've been writing about one part at a time (the novel is split into four parts, each of which is split into three books for a total of twelve), I've said little to nothing of how Dusty arranged the books and how they relate to one another.

The indisputable focus of Part III is Dmitri. Wedged into the opening, though, is a seemingly unrelated book, Book VII, about the aftermath of Father Zosima's death. In that Book, there are mentions of two traditions that emerged from the deaths of various holy men. The first is the expectation that a saint's remains have the power to perform healing miracles. Father Paissy, monk and close friend of Zosima's, notes that the townspeople's intense expectation was "displayed with such haste, such openness, even with impatience and almost insistence" that he considered it "an evil temptation," though he himself hoped for the same. The second tradition relates to the "odor of corruption." Saints' bodies allegedly succumbed to putrefaction slower than other bodies, if at all. The notion began when monks seemed to notice that a handful of holy men did not smell after death, and it transformed from anomaly to dogma.

We can read this snowballing of coincidence into inviolable truth as a parallel to the case that mounts against Dmitri. Though we like to believe that courts make few mistakes, the novel's portrayal of events showcase the pitfalls of human fallibility. When Pytor Ilyich goes to the police to tell them that he suspected Dmitri had murdered his father based on circumstantial evidence like blood on his hands, he was beaten to the punch by a woman named Marya Kondratyevna, Fyodor's neighbor, who was alerted by his servants that he was dead: “She [Marya Kondratyevna] arrived only five minutes before Pyotr Ilyich, so that his story came, not as his own surmise and theory, but as the direct confirmation, by a witness, of the theory held by all…” Conjecture and hypothesis play a large role in the accusations against Dmitri.

Speaking of conjecture, before Dmitri's arrest, there are a string of references to mathematics. We've heard a lot about math from Dmitri and from Ivan. Recall that cerebral Ivan finds solace in math: not being able to understand the endeavors of mathematicians is proof for him that he is not meant to understand God, freeing himself from problems of faith and doubt. For Dmitri, however, God besets men with riddles, which appear like two banks of a river, parallel lines which perspectivally meet at infinity. Through mathematics, the complexity of these characters is revealed: Ivan is the "smart" brother, but he is happy to accept math without understanding it; Dmitri, the over-the-top sensualist, struggles with comprehend God's plague of hidden meaning and paradoxical logic.

At any rate, number for yourself the references to math: "At that moment [Dmitri] saw fully, as a mathematical certainty, that this was his last hope." Again, now from Madame Khokhlakova: "This is a case of mathematics: you [Dmitri] couldn't help coming, after all that has passed with Katerina Ivanovna; you couldn't, you couldn't that's a mathematical certainty." Once more: "I'm all for science and realism now... Have you quite made up your mind? Answer mathematically." And finally, from Dmitri: "In all probability, he's alone." We can read this as standing in contrast to and foreshadowing the haphazard nature of the trial, with its circumstantial witnesses and lack of hard evidence. 

Infinite Jest

Dosty loved Shakespeare, and there have been a few references to the bard here and there, but this Part contains four very significant instances (or at least four that I noticed quickly and wrote down).

First of all, there's a discussion about Othello in relation to Dmitri's jealousy. While Dmitri is vile and base and disposed to jealousy, Othello is an honorable man who had to be pushed in order to hide and spy and doubt the faithfulness of Desdemona; the narrator quotes Pushkin: "Othello was not jealous, he was trustful." His soul was shattered when his ideal was destroyed. Moreover, Othello could not be truly jealous, because jealous men "are the readiest of all to forgive." This is derived from their detachment from reality: "If he can somehow be convinced that it has all been 'for the last time,' and that his rival will vanish from that day forward, will depart to the ends of the earth, or that he himself will carry her away somewhere," then he can forgive. Othello, on the other hand, was not truly jealous because he could not think this way; he could not forgive his wife for her imagined faithlessness.

Dmitri himself makes a reference to Shakespeare. In a lovelorn daze, he muses about women, similarly to how Fyodor did earlier: “Woman, I love woman! What is woman? The queen of creation! I am sad, I am sad, Pyotr Ilyich. Do you remember Hamlet? ‘I am so sad, so sad, Horatio… Oh, poor Yorick!’ Perhaps that’s me, Yorick? Yes, I’m Yorick now, and a skull afterwards.” Misquotations aside (I don't think Hamlet ever said, "I am so sad"), we can recall that Yorick was Hamlet's childhood jester ("a fellow of infinite jest"), a fool, whose skull Hamlet finds in the graveyard at the beginning of the final act. 

The next is during a beautiful reconciliation between Dmitri and Grushenka. Grushenka emphasizes that she's a changed woman by asserting that she will become holy: “Do you know, Mitya, I shall go into a nunnery… Tomorrow to the nunnery, but today we’ll dance.” This is another Hamlet reference, when he tells Ophelia to "get thee to a nunnery" during one of his batshit rants. Grushenka is every bit the sensualist that Dmitri is, so the disposition toward convoluted schemes and escapes from reality applies to her as well. 

Finally is Pytor Ilyich, whom Dmitri goes to after brutalizing Grigory. Pytor is shocked to find Dmitri's hands covered in blood and helps him wash it off. This reference, and the whole notion of having "blood on your hands" comes from Macbeth when Lady Macbeth sleepwalks and sleepwashes her hands: "Out, damn'd spot!" Macbeth himself makes a similar comment: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" answering: "No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red." 

The easiest way to connect all these references is as foreshadowing Dmitri's downfall: Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth are Shakespeare's most famous tragedies (I bet we'd find a King Lear reference if we looked hard enough), and in Book VIII, where all of these are contained, Dmitri experiences the greatest joy he has in the entire novel -- winning Grushenka's love -- only to have it immediately torn from him. (Although we must not believe that the arrest is a stumbling block to his joy: he has Grushenka, and that is more than enough for him.)

Stray Observations

• I'm officially further than I was the last time I stopped, which came in the middle of the chapter titled, "The Former and Indisputable One," in which Dmitri meets the Polish soldier who was Grushenka's first love. They -- Dmitri, Grushenka, the officer, and a few others -- drink and play cards in a scene that reminded me a lot of the tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds in that it was multilingual and incredibly boring.
• Rakitin to Alyosha: “So you despise me now for those twenty-five rubles? I’ve sold my friend, you think. But you are not Christ, you know, and I am not Judas.” See “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream”: “I said, You know they refused Jesus, too / He said, You’re not him.” And Breaking Bad: “Just because you killed Jesse James don’t make you Jesse James.” 
• Grushenka tells a story about an onion: There was a wicked woman who was cast into a lake of fire when she died. Her guardian angel was distraught and appealed to God, who asked if she had done anything kind in her life. The angel said that she had once given an onion to a beggar-woman, so God tells him to use that onion to pull her out of hell. The angel goes down and lowers the onion, and the woman graciously grabs hold. When the other people being tormented see her being pulled to heaven, they grab her legs to be pulled up as well. She worries that they will add too much weight and kicks them, saying, "I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours." Upon her saying this, the onion snaps and she falls back into the fire. Grushenka compares herself to the woman, saying she has only done "one onion," a single good deed in her life. We should consider this when thinking about Grushenka, but we should also pay attention to the woman's words: "It's my onion, not yours." 
• Dmitri, likewise, has a story that appears to him in the form of a dream. He sees a line of peasant women, one of whom has a crying baby. He asks why the baby is crying, to which someone responds, "It's a baby." Unsatisfied, he continues to ask why, like a petulant child would, until finally he articulates the question he wants to ask: "'Tell me: why is it those poor mothers stand there, why are people poor, why is the babe poor, why is the steppe barren, why don't they hug each other and kiss, why don't they sing songs of joy, why are they so dark from black misery, why don't they feed the babe?' And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless, yet he wanted to ask just that."
• Dmitri: "Though I make up my mind every day, and every day spur myself on to do it, and yet for a whole month I can't bring myself to do it, you see." The feeling always passed.
• Related to this, Alyosha has a powerful, visceral reaction to the odor of corruption leaking from his mentor's corpose. But not a day later, "Joy, joy was glowing in his mind and in his heart." The odor of corruption, which made Alyosha feel awful and humiliated, "no longer made him feel miserable or indignant" even though it had "a few hours before." We would do well to recall Zosima's comment about Job: "It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy." 
• Alyosha gets some nice lines in this section: “Tragic phrases comfort the heart… Without them, sorrow would be too heavy for men to bear.” And later:  “There’s no living without joy,” Mitya says… 'Everything that is true and beautiful is always full of forgiveness.'" (cf. "Ode on a Grecian Urn") As he stares up at the night sky, “the silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens," echoing Ovid's conception of universal contiguity.
• What a beautiful contrast to show that Grushenka loves Dmitri: throughout the novel, Dmitri has called himself an insect, a worm, a viper; to Grushenka, though, he is a falcon.  “A falcon flew in and my heart sank. ‘Fool! That’s the man you love!’ That was what my heart whispered to me at once.”

Ovid, Metamorphoses

I watch a lot of How I Met Your Mother, and I think one of its greatest successes is its ability to jump back and forth in time without displacing the viewer. It is, by virtue of the framing device of Ted telling his kids how he met their mother, a continual story-within-a-story, and the characters themselves are prone to flashbacks, digressions, and imagination. It's an admirable exercise in time travel, and they pull it off well.

I'd like to imagine that at the start of every season, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas sit at a long writers' table with individual copies of Ovid's Metamorphoses, furiously highlighting and diagramming all the story arcs, mumbling, "Shit, that's good, why didn't we think of that?" That's because Ovid's poem, stretching 15 books and almost 600 pages, is not just a compendium of Greek and Roman mythology, but a narrative that weaves all the stories together like the cult of Minerva sitting at their looms. Tying together so many disparate stories would be an achievement in itself, but there is even more to it. In a poem about stories, the characters themselves drive the action by telling stories of their own; the original threads often get lost in the fray, but you don't get hung up on it, because that's the point: one story begets another, and the effect is less like HIMYM's Matryoshka flashbacks and more like the titular metamorphoses.


Metamorphosis, or Universal Contiguity

Ovid has a specific goal in writing a book of myths connected by metamorphoses. To shed light on what that is, let's look briefly at the uses of metamorphosis in the poem. When the gods travel down to earth, they usually change their form temporarily (in Jove's case, so that he won't be identified as the serial rapist terrorizing Greece). More often, however, transformations are permanent, sudden, and imposed rather than voluntary. They can be punishments (Diana is particularly fond of this usage), but they can also be saving graces: Myrrha is changed into a tree when she is afraid of bearing her and her father's lovechild.

Metamorphosis also creates a connection between people. Pythagoras, the Greek mystic and mathematician, shows up in the second-to-last book to espouse his -- and likely Ovid's -- philosophy on metamorphosis: "For all things change, but no thing dies... Your bodies, whether they have been consumed by flames upon the pyre or worn away by time, can suffer nothing more, I say. But over souls – be sure – death has no sway: each soul, once it has left one body, takes another body as its home, the place where it lives on.” All this is to say that Pythagoras shares the belief, along with Buddhists, Father Zosima in Brothers K, and countless others, that time "is like a river, flowing on an endless course." It's fascinating how often this thought occurs.

Connections don't exist only between souls. Italo Calvino writes an essay entitled "Ovid and Universal Contiguity" that stresses the connection made between heaven and earth and among all earthly things. Metamorphosis is the means through which Ovid emphasizes that all is one, made up of the same basic elements. For example, "what most catches the attention about Daphne is her disheveled hair... so that in the flowing lines of her flight she is already predisposed toward metamorphosis into a plant." The transformations are much like those in Beauty and the Beast, where the Beast's servants are turned into household objects but retain their human characteristics, e.g. the boy a chipped tooth becomes a chipped teacup. Calvino quotes an essay by some dude named Shcheglov: "The event [metamorphosis] is no longer represented as a fable, but as a set of habitual and likely facts: growth, diminution, hardening, softening, curving, straightening, compression, rarefaction, etc." There are no wild metamorphoses, only those that could arise from natural processes. 

It should be noted that the focus on metamorphosis makes stories without a transformation stand out. When Procris, who suspects her husband Cephalus of cheating, secretly follows him on his hunt, she is pierced by his arrows when he takes her rustling to be that of an animal. Instead of a god saving her by turning her into a tree that is unaffected by the arrow or a bird that can dodge it, she is struck and dies, leaving her husband to grieve without hope. (He deserves it though: he basically forced her to cheat on him by turning into another man and seducing her and then being like, "Hah! I knew you were cheating on me, whore.") 


Love

Though Metamorphoses is an epic poem, it has little in common with the Iliad and the Odyssey, or ever the Aeneid. The focus is not on battle and bravery, although all three of those poems are featured and summarized. Ovid's preoccupation is with love, which isn't surprising given that he wrote a ton of love poetry.

Ovid gives love the treatment that war received in other Classical poems, elevating it to divine status, and he features the entire spectrum of human relationships: love at first sight, which men are particularly susceptible to; obsessive love, which afflicts women; incest; homosexual relationships; and self-love, in the form of Narcissus (whose lament, by the way, is really beautiful). His account of Pyramus and Thisbe lives on as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. (Theirs is arguably a better love story. The lovers live next door to one another, but are kept from being together, a prohibition they circumvent by speaking to each other through a crack in the wall: “The wall their houses shared had one thin crack, / Which formed when they were built and then was left; / In all these years, no one had seen that cleft; / but lovers will discover every thing.”)

I'll close this short section with just a few lines:

“Joy indeed can’t be complete, and happiness is always marred by griefs.”

“We lovers fear all things!”

“Sorrow has its origin in joys.”

“It is audacity that’s opportune in love.” 

And one of the best uses of iambic pentameter:

"Don’t let them write upon my sepulcher that I have died because of you.” 

Life

I'm really glad I stuck it out with Ovid because it finally allowed me to articulate what I love about Greek and Roman writing. From a passage about a wave capsizing a ship: “A wave, triumphant – proud of all its spoils and prey – heaves high, looks down upon the other waves, until – as if one were to tear away Mount Athos or Mount Pindus from its base – it falls headlong and, with its crushing weight, sends down the ship.”

It's rare to find this sort of fantastical personification in any other literature. In the midst of the hero's ship being swept into the sea, the wave is not portrayed menacing or evil, but triumphant and proud: it earns its own story, the tale of a small wave who dreams of being a monstrous tsunami and gets its wish. The Greeks and Romans seem to be able to find unfettered joy in all aspects of nature. It's too sentimental and over-the-top to find nowadays.

It reminds me of a quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude: on his writing being tagged as "magical realism," Garcia Marquez said, "reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs;" that is to say, realism is all well and good, but there's more to the realness than facts. The ancients seem to understand this, and a sort of everyday magic permeates their logic. 

Stray Observations

• Metamorphosis isn't always physical. When Daedalus' son Icarus dies because he flew too close to the sun with wax wings, he names an island "Icaria" in his memory. 
• Another example of over-the-top Roman metaphors: “As, when the axes strike the massive trunk, the tree will waver at the moment just before the final blow: one does not know which way it is to fall; upon all sides men now rush off – so, too, enfeebled by so many blows from many sides, the mind of Myrrha leans this way, then that.” 
• Personified Envy is all about opposites. “She never smiles except when some sad sight brings her delight; she is denied sweet sleep, for she is too preoccupied, forever vigilant; when men succeed, she is displeased – success means her defeat.” And: “It is hard for Envy not to weep, since there is nothing there that calls for tears.” 
• I saw a book at 57th Street Books called Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes and, damn, it's true, but not only of Zeus (Jove/Jupiter). The gods generally seem incapable of even basic insight. Case in point: Phoebus, god of the sun, is approached by his illegitimate son, Phaeton, who asks his father for proof of his divine heritage. Phoebus isn't sure what proof he can offer, so Phaeton, being a dumb teenager, asks if he can ride Phoebus ridiculous sun-chariot. Phoebus is unsure but ultimately relents, and Phaeton has fun until he loses control and burns up the entire fucking earth. 
• There's a very shot story about a wolf in one of the books that really stood out to me for a reason I can't quite explain. 
• It's been almost a year since I graduated college, so here's a cliche line about time: "The flight of time eludes our eyes, it glides unseen; no thing is swifter than the years." I might as well have quoted Green Day's "Time of Your Life."