Narcissus

They say I invented things out of nothing. If I could laugh in this world, I would guffaw with all my jaws: are they not, they too, inventors? I was not startled by what I lately understood from those who have come down to this place (I knew them all, and among them I had no friend)—that a long tale is told of my death. Were not stories told of me in my lifetime?

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They said Echo was smitten with me. They saw her love (it was like their own love) and their eyes were quenched white, so they did not observe that it was I who was smitten (I did not kindle my love with their matches). She loved me, they said, because they heard her confess; and she recoiled, they said, because the knot in my tongue would not loosen. Would that I could guffaw—I would have carried my guffaws to their bolted ears. Did they want me to confess to them, and to hover the whisperings over their own heads? My silence galled them when a man was wedded; it had long galled them that the big-buttocked one should flutter by and I not trill for joy, and that the twirl-mustached one should be given back to the wide earth and I not send up wailings. It galled them to see me silent among them, and it galled them more that I should not be among them at all.

They knew that I invent things out of nothing, so it dismayed them that I would not make of the great thing some small thing. They doubted, therefore, the great thing.

She alone did not doubt. At first she did not doubt: she was content with our meetings beside the spring, where she would draw herself up before me—"A stranger you are among us, and your love is strange, strange"—and purse her fertile lips and add: "And I do not know whether it is the most delicious thing I have wanted, or the basest." She was content with our meetings at the spring, and with fragments I would utter without meaning to utter. She would repeat them after me, and repeat them again, and lift up the call, singing them, for far and near to hear. I loved her when I glimpsed her love for me—and I loved her because she repeated what I say.

At first she did not doubt. Afterward she took to urging me to say something, so that the people might hear what I say. She took to demanding love-songs of me, refusing to let me put on my two wings at the spring and swoop down with her. And she would not look into my eyes, lest she lower her gaze, listening for a treachery in me that she found already budding. But she kept coming back to what she said. She did not grasp that it is in silence that I say the sweetest of what I say. And she would toy with my breast: "Some are for living, and some for bestowing life. I gave it to you and you refused it; I wanted it and you did not give." She whispers, and I cannot unriddle what she says. Doubt gnawed at me, and gnawed harder as I glimpsed her repeating of my fragments grow less, and herself dwindle, and saw her draw away from me little by little (she was with me; she was theirs, not mine). Until she vanished, and the spring, with me, yearned after her.

Among their tales is that she sickened because I did not return her passion, and that she wasted away little by little until her very form was effaced. A tale among their tales. Otherwise I should have found her in this house of meeting.

There would reach me, while I was on earth, whispers of her: that she was seen near an oracle, repeating what a god had uttered; that she visited the Acropolis when the orator visited; that she raised her faded voice in cursing, the day a carousing lover cursed her. And they said that she cursed me—me—before she died; that she cried to heaven that heaven avenge her upon me; and that she specified the vengeance she wanted: that I should taste bitter love—that I should love my own self.

I wished I could guffaw: they do not know how to invent. Could she have asked heaven to avenge her upon me so, when she knew that when I loved her (as I ought not to have loved) I loved together with her another being—that together with her I loved my own self?

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And they said her curse leafed out quickly, and so I kept to the spring—not because its waters are the storehouse of the secret from which I used to pluck my posies, and the one besides us two who witnessed our love, and heard, and spoke one night when I knew not what I was saying—but because those waters reflected to me the self I had come to love (they did not know that it is I who reflect to the spring its waters). So I kept to it, and worshipped it.

I worshipped my self as I had worshipped, before, Echo. But I kept to my self and did not flee from it, inventing curses against it. I kept to it, they said, and did not freeze

as I froze with Echo. I drew near to it and it did not draw near; I made love to it and it did not listen to me. I stretched out my arm, and poplar leaves made a pillow of it, and the winds twined about it. I gazed upon my self and glimpsed it gazing upon me; I gathered all my love into one look, and saw its like in its two pupils; and I understood that in it was flame the like of the flame in my own gaze, and that only the water of the spring kept its blaze from flaring up. So I rushed to it—and embracing it, embraced annihilation.

I understood from those who have come down to these abodes that they searched for me in the spring and did not find my bones. And they glorified the avenging heaven: not content with making me love my own self as Echo had loved me, it destroyed me as it destroyed her; and as she vanished without a trace, so I vanished.

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They said and they said; and in some of what they said there is truth, though they do not know it.

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Without a trace she vanished—save a curse that soon leafed out; and without a trace I vanished—save a hidden thing that turned, on the bank of the spring, into a beloved narcissus.

What do I care that they did not think of it: their beloved is a curse, and the outcast a beloved narcissus (she loved, and cursed; and out of the harsh came forth sweetness).

Tomorrow she will come, and say over to me: "and your love is strange, strange." And she will purse her lips, ready for the harvest; and she may say it is the most delicious thing she wanted, and she may say it is the basest; but she will tell me that she used to gather narcissus in secret, and that the narcissus, among her people, has become the lover's gift.

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They say I invented things out of nothing. How I wish I could guffaw: did they not understand that I scattered her, and annihilated my self, and a passion that might have begotten—so as to create out of all these things: that one young thing?