Something About Eve

    But when the temple burned, it became more than a temple, for not only the flanks of Mt. Moriah were ablaze, a whole city was burning there, and its name was Ilion. He aided in the pillaging of it: the golden armor of Achilles fell to his share. In such heroic gear, he, like a fox hidden in a slain lion’s skin, took ship to Ismaurus, which city he treacherously laid waste and robbed: thence he passed to the land of the Lotophagi, where he viewed with mildly curious, cool scorn the men who fed upon oblivion. He was captured by a very bad-smelling, one-eyed giant, from whom he through his wiles escaped. There was no one anywhere more quick in wiles than was Odysseus, Laertes’ son. He toiled unhurt through a nightmare of pitfalls and bufferings, among never-tranquil seas, outwitting the murderous Laestrigonians, and hoodwinking Circe and the feathery-legged Sirens and fond Calypso: he evaded the man-eating ogress with six heads: he passed among the fluttering, gray, squeaking dead, and got the better of Hades’ sullen overlords and ugly spectres, through his unfailing wiliness,—he who was still a poet, making the supreme poem of each man’s journeying through an everywhere inimical and betraying world, he, who was pursued by the wrath of Heaven which Poseidon had stirred up against Odysseus. But always the wiles of much-enduring Odysseus evaded the full force of Heaven’s bufferings, so that in the end he won home to Ithaca and to his meritorious wife; and then, when the suitors of Penelope had been killed, he went, as dead Tiresias had commanded, into a mountainous country carrying upon his shoulder an oar, and leading a tethered ram, for it was yet necessary to placate Heaven. Beyond Epirus, among the high hills of the Thesproteans, he sat the oar upright in the stony ground, and turning toward the ram which he now meant to sacrifice to Poseidon, he found Heaven’s amiability to remain unpurchased, because the offering of Odysseus, who was a rebel against Heaven’s will to destroy him, had been refused, and the ram had vanished.

    But in his hand was still the rope with which he had led this ram, and in his other hand was a bag containing silver money, and in his heart, now that he had again turned northerly, to find in place of the oar an elder-tree in flower, now in his heart was the knowledge that no man could travel beyond him in hopelessness and in infamy. He remembered all that he had put away, all which he had denied and betrayed, all the kindly wonders which he had witnessed between Galilee and Jerusalem, where the carpenters of the Sanhedrin were now fashioning, from a great lichen-crusted cedar log found floating in the Pool of Bethesda, that cross which would be set up to-morrow morning upon Mt. Calvary. Then Judas flung down the accursed silver and the rope with which he had come hither to destroy himself, because an infamy so complete as his must first be expressed with fitting words. It was a supreme infamy, it was man’s masterpiece in the way of iniquity, it was the reply of a very fine poet to Heaven’s proffered truce after so many aeons of tormenting men causelessly: it was a thing not to be spoken of but sung. He heaped great sheets of lead upon his chest, he slit the cord beneath his tongue, he tormented himself with clysters and with purges and in all other needful ways, so that his voice might be at its most effective when he sang toward Heaven about his infamy.