He is not at all the hero we might expect. Ignored, harassed, and pushed around by the gods, Aeneas won’t give up hope that love might serve as a guide.īaffling times and inner bafflement feed off each other-this might be why the character of Aeneas appeals to me so much this time around, the way he’s continuously at war with himself and his fate. As Aeneas goes to the underworld to receive a vision of the future, he prays to his mother (Love personified) saying “do not fail your son / in a baffling time” (translated by Robert Fitzgerald). The future hovers like a hazy limbo we don’t know when this exile from each other will end. Those we love, seen through screens darkly, can too easily seem as intangible as vanishing dreams, ghost versions of themselves. We visit our grandparents through nursing-home windows. We speak to family and friends through Zoom or Skype. But there are others we want to embrace and cannot. We embrace-with heightened poignancy-our kids, our spouses. Each of us is Aeneas, trying to hold onto the ghost of a job or a class or a routine, the sense of the normal, even as all of that slips away, “as if it were a breeze or on the wings of a vanishing dream . . .”Īeneas’s grief at not being able to touch those he loves has taken on a dark echo. Now, though, I read this poem and think not just of my own personal losses, but of the life that seems to be slipping through our collective arms, the life that was ours just a few months ago. Even if you are a hero to your people, you are still vulnerable. This is, after all, a book of tears: _Sunt lacrimae rerum. _Even if your mother is a goddess, you have no special access to the divine. These moments always choke me up, as I’m sure they’re meant to. Three times the image, clasped in vain, escaped Three times I tried to embrace her and to hold her Leaving me weeping, with so much still to say. Then, in Book II, as he is fleeing the fires of Troy, Aeneas encounters the ghost of his wife Creusa: Why cannot I hold hands with you, my mother,Īnd hear true words and speak true words to you? (translated by David Ferry) Aeneas tells about the storm that has led him and his people off course, after which his mother reveals her identity and then immediately disappears. First his mother, Venus, appears to him, disguised as a young Spartan huntress.
Twice in the first two books of the Aeneid, Aeneas wants to embrace someone he loves, but cannot.
0 kommentar(er)
