Reading 9

“I asked her, ‘You hit a deer. What was that like?’ She drew her eyebrows together, just a little. ‘It was like a collision with the divine,’ she said. ‘You’ve read Euripides, right?’ I said, ‘Yes. I have.’ She said, again, ‘Well. It was a collision with the divine.’”

- Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (2020)

“Some say that when Zeus fell in love with Nemesis, she fled from him into the water and became a fish; he pursued her as a beaver, ploughing up the waves. She leaped ashore, and transformed herself into this wild beast or that, but could not shake Zeus off, because he borrowed the from of even fiercer and swifter beasts.”

- Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (1955)

“Anchises had been intimate with a divine being, as intimate as intimate can be. Not a common experience. In the whole of Christian mythology, setting aside the Apocrypha, there is only one parallel event, and that in the commoner form, with the male god--rather impersonally, rather distantly, it must be said--impregnating the mortal woman. Magnificat Dominum anima mea, Mary is reputed to have said afterwards, perhaps misheard from Magnam me facit Dominus. That is pretty much all she says in the Gospels, this maid who is matchless, as though struck dumb for the rest of her life by what befell her. No one around her has the shamelessness to enquire, What was it like, how did it feel, how did you bear it? Yet the question must surely have occurred to people, to her girlfriends in Nazareth for instance. How did she bear it? they must have whispered among themselves. It must have been like being fucked by a whale. It must have been like being fucked by the Leviathan.”

- J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (2003)