The Woman of Andros quotes

The earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shadow of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness.

The great cliff that was one day to be called Gibraltar held for a long time a gleam of red and orange, while across from it the mountains of Atlas showed deep blue pockets in their shining sides.

Triumph had passed from Greece and wisdom from Egypt, but with the coming on of night they seemed to regain their lost honors, and the land that was soon to be called Holy prepared in the dark its wonderful burden.

The sea was large enough to hold a varied weather: a storm played about Sicily and its smoking mountains, but at the mouth of the Nile the water lay like a wet pavement.

A fair tripping breeze ruffled the Aegean and all the islands of Greece felt a new freshness at the close of day.

“Grandchildren!—that’s what I want to see. There shouldn’t be a long step between the generations. It’s bad for customs and manners.”

“You’ll make a greater mistake by hurrying than by delaying.”

“Well,” Chremes continued, “there’s another reason why I want the matter settled soon. And that is this: we don’t like the visits that Pamphilus is paying to the Andrian woman.

Chrysis moved slightly to one side and stretching her arm along the parapet looked down into the harbor.

“Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them, Simo. Magnanimity does not bargain with its powers.”

These maxims were almost murmured; then she raised her head and said to him: “I cannot do that, unless I tell your son that it is because you have ordered it.”

They stood looking at one another.

Simo suddenly realized that he lived among people of thin natures and that he was lonely; he was out of practice in conversing with sovereign personalities whose every speech arose from resources of judgment and inner poise.

With his wife, with Chremes, with the islanders one could talk with half one’s mind and still hold one’s authority, but here in a few moments this woman had caught him twice at a disadvantage. Chrysis saw this and came to his aid;

Simo trudged home in an unaccustomed elation. It made him happy to hear Pamphilus praised and “probably this woman was an exceptional judge of persons.”

He had made a fool of himself, but in good hands one does not mind.

“Life ... life ...,” he said to himself, hunting for a generalization that would describe its diversity, its power of casting up from time to time on the waves of tedious circumstance such star-like persons.

(She cited often the saying of Plato that the true philosophers are the young men of their age. “Not,” she would add, “because they do it very well; but because they rush upon ideas with their whole soul.

Later one philosophizes for praise, or for apology, or because it is a complicated intellectual game.

”) Pamphilus remembered that on one evening the conversation had turned upon the wrong that poets do in pretending that life is heroic. And a boy from the other end of the island had said, half-mockingly and half-hopefully: “Well, you know, Chrysis ...

He descended into the courtyard. His mother lifted her eyes from the loom and greeted him and went on with her work. His father passed through the court unseeing, for on that day his mind had been full of care.

Suddenly the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.

And not an hour had gone by before the hero who was both watching life and living it called on Zeus to release him from so terrible a dream.

for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment. And not an hour had gone by before the hero who was both watching life and living it called on Zeus to release him from so terrible a dream.

The gods heard him, but before he left he fell upon the ground and kissed the soil of the world that is too dear to be realized.

”

Indeed the profession she followed was one of those that emphasize the dim notion that lies at the back of many minds: the notion that we are not necessary to anyone, that attachments weave and unweave at the mercy of separation, satiety and experience.

The loneliest associations are those that pretend to intimacy.

But she had discovered two ways of mitigating this unresponsiveness and instability in the world she lived in. The first was the development she brought to the institution of the hetaira’s banquet.

The first was the development she brought to the institution of the hetaira’s banquet. She took endless pains over these reunions and to the wide-eyed guests they seemed indeed all that one could conceive of wit and eloquence and aristocratic ease.

Great talkers are so constituted that they do not know their own thoughts until, on the tide of their particular gift, they hear them issuing from their mouths.

Chrysis gave herself that luxury, the luxury of talking to these young men from her whole mind. Much of it lay beyond their reach; but her refusal to condescend, her assumption that the analysis of ideas and of masterpieces was their natural element, excited them.

The personalities of her flock were extinguished. They fretted; they hovered about the gates peering in the direction from which she would return, and their minds ceased to act save in terms of that resentment which is the complement of devotion.

She did not realize that this wasting of love in fretfulness was one of the principal activities on the planet.

When she was away fear descended upon them;

Niceratus found this remark unseemly and left the house. (He absented himself from the two successive banquets, but later returned and asked her pardon for making a personal grievance out of a difference of opinion. Confessions of error always gave Chrysis great pleasure.

“Happy are the associations,” she would say, “that have grown out of a fault and a forgiveness.”

)

She was already troubled by her recent discomfiture of Niceratus and now chose to be magnanimous. She arose and approached the young fanatic; taking his hand she smiled at him with grave affection, saying to the company:

“It is true that of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.”

But these incidents were not of a nature to distract her mind from the protracted oppression of the day. “Vain. Empty. Transitory,” the voice within her repeated.

“But where will I be five years from now and ten years from now,” she cried, staring about her wildly. “I don’t know. I’m afraid. I’m unhappy. Everyone in the world is happy except me.”

The caress of the hands in first love, and never so simply again, seems to be a sharing of courage, an alliance of two courages against a confusing world.

As his hand passed from her hair to her shoulder, she turned to him with parted lips and hesitant eyes, then suddenly bound both her arms about his neck. Into his ears her lips wildly and all but meaninglessly repeated: “Yes. Yes. Yes.

His last thought had been the recollection of one of Chrysis’s maxims, an ironic phrase which he had chosen to take literally:

The mistakes we make through generosity are less terrible than the gains we acquire through caution.

Simo was not vexed. He sighed. Looking up he saw the priest of Æsculapius and Apollo running around the course. He recalled the day several months before when he and Sostrata had taken Pamphilus’s sister to the temple.

The priest gently touched her ear, reciting a charm. He poured in some oil and looked deeply into her shy eyes. And gradually as he gazed at her a smile appeared upon his lips and slowly she smiled in return.

True influence over another comes not from a moment’s eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a lifetime’s thoughts stored up in the eyes.

And there is one thing greater than curing a malady and that is accepting a malady and sharing its acceptance. The ear-ache did not abate at once, but Argo pretended to her parents that it did, for the other healing they would not have understood;

True influence over another comes not from a moment’s eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a lifetime’s thoughts stored up in the eyes.

And there is one thing greater than curing a malady and that is accepting a malady and sharing its acceptance.

The ear-ache did not abate at once, but Argo pretended to her parents that it did, for the other healing they would not have understood;