winter

with Homer and Hilary Mantel

I take seasonality very seriously. Gaining light in the spring never fails to enliven me, and losing it in the fall always trips me up. In the darkest months of the year I ruminate; memories and fears seem more real. I sleep more. When I was a child in Massachusetts, the long, cold winter nights could sometimes offer incredible serenity; now that I am an adult in England, the deeper darkness and the interminable damp bring about a sense of closeness and unease, and I have nightmares.

All this to say that I find the dark months, December and January, very difficult. This is the kind of agony that is so banal that it is sort of embarrassing to talk about, but I think the banal — in this case, the shortening of the days; in other, more extreme cases, death and other catastrophic losses — is the temporality in which agony resides, in which we actually have to deal with it.

In Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books, the dark months are when the title character remembers the people he has lost. We know that the historical Cromwell’s wife and two daughters died in the same year of the mysterious ‘sweating sickness’ that was at that time epidemic in England. Around the same year, Cromwell’s patron Cardinal Wolsey fell out of favor and died. In fiction, this amount of loss stretches the boundaries of believable narrative. Reading Mantel’s account of Cromwell’s life at this point is shocking — surely, he won’t lose nearly his entire immediate family? Not Wolsey, too?

What struck me when I read this part of Wolf Hall is that this degree of staggering loss feels unreal. It pushes fictionality to its limit; it takes the reader out of the story. Cromwell, too, is dazed and unbelieving at first, but what the series shows so well is the granularity of his having to… just live with it. As the plot moves on, Cromwell suffers, sublimates his pain, and remembers his wife and daughters in winter, imagines them haunting the house when the days are dark. After many years they start to feel less present, but they always emerge when the house prepares for Christmas. Loss, like the rhythm of the seasons, is the most banal thing of all.

I have been teaching the Iliad this term, another text in which shocking amounts of people die. Upon this reading, what has struck me most about the text is Achilles’ ultimate identification with humanity as a whole, and his radical construction of a community of suffering mortals, who must mourn throughout their lives for loved ones and must eventually face the prospect of their own deaths. In Book 24, Priam, king of Troy, visits Achilles and begs him to return the body of his son, Hektor, which Achilles has kept and mutilated after killing Hektor on the battlefield. This was in revenge for Hektor’s killing of Achilles’ foster-brother and ‘beloved companion’, Patroklus, but even killing Hektor has given Achilles no peace. He finds himself unable to eat, sleep, or integrate back into the community of the Achaean camp, instead laying awake, pacing by the sea, and occasionally dragging Hektor’s body around from the back of his chariot in an attempt to finally feel better.

Priam, at great personal risk, enters the enemy camp and approaches Achilles at his hut. Then we have this scene (sorry for making you read 50 lines of the Iliad, I tried to condense where possible):

And Priam, supplicating him, said:
’Godlike Achilles, remember your father,
old like me, on the deadly threshold of age.
And I think it likely that his neighbors,
around him on every side, worry and weaken him —
there is no one to defend him from war and ruin.
But when he hears that you are still alive,
he rejoices in his heart, and hopes every day
to see his beloved son, coming home from Troy.
But me — everything is painful to me,
because I was father to the best sons in broad Troy,
and, I tell you, not one of them is left alive.
There were fifty, when the sons of the Achaeans came…
furious Ares cut them all down at the knees,
and the one that was left to me, Hektor, you killed him.
Now I come to the ships of the Achaeans for his sake,
to ransom him from you, and I offer untold wealth.
But have respect for the gods, Achilles, and pity me,
remembering your father. But I am far more pitiable,
for I have suffered what no other mortal in the world
has yet suffered: to stretch my hand toward the face
of the man who murdered my sons’.

Thus he spoke, and stirred up desire in Achilles
to mourn for his father.
Grasping the old man by the hand, he gently pushed him away.
And the two remembered — the one, crumpled at Achilles’ feet
cried aloud for man-killing Hektor, but Achilles
cried for his father, and sometimes for Patroklus.
Their sound of their grieving filled the house.
But when godlike Achilles was satisfied with mourning,
and longing had gone from his body,
then he leapt up from his chair, and raising the old man by the hand,
pitying his grey head and his grey beard,
he spoke winged words:

‘Ah, miserable man, you have borne so many terrible things.
How could you stand to come alone to the Achaean ships,
to look the man in the eye who has killed your sons in battle?
Your heart is iron. But come and have a seat,
and let us endure the pain in our hearts, though it is agony.
It is no good to mourn. The gods have woven life for wretched mortals,
that we might live painfully, while they themselves live without a care.
Two jars sit on the doorsill of Zeus. One dispenses good, the other, evil.’¹

Achilles has spent the entire epic up to this point resisting community in some way. Yet here, with his enemy, with whom he has no interests in common but his own mortality, he grieves that mortality. Achilles and Priam are both doomed to die, and they both know this. When Achilles grieves for the father he cannot protect, he grieves himself, as he will die before he ever sees him again. When Priam grieves for the sons who cannot protect him, he grieves for himself, seeing his own death that will come when his city falls. In grieving with Priam, Achilles reconstrues community and value. Previously, he has desired love, honor and wealth within the context of the community of the Achaeans at Troy; now he desires only life, like any other mortal, and he cannot have it, and neither, in the end, can anyone else.

At the very end of the Iliad, we see the women of Troy lament for Hector. The final lament is from Helen, who mourns Hektor because he was one of the only one of the Trojans (besides Priam) who was ever nice to her. He made her daily life a little better. What she loved in Hektor was the stuff of the banal — his words of kindness, his everyday attention to her. This is the sort of thing I think about in winter — the people who still haunt my quotidian life, the loss of moments of sunlight, the Achillean community of mankind whose only recourse is to mourn the smallness of life together.

I’m sorry if this comes off as gloomy, melodramatic and scattered. Entering December is never easy, this year perhaps more than most for various reasons. If you, like me, find this time difficult, I do especially recommend the Iliad (and lots of Sophocles as well) for this part of the year. It’s bleak, but it really helps.

1. My translation; it is pretty lazy and slightly condensed, so keep that in mind.