Academic Platypus

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Thus I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a little glass jar, and the boys asked her: "Sybil, what will you?". She responded "I want to die". -Petronius*

"April is the cruelest month." -T.S. Eliot

Eliot opens his modernist masterpiece, The Wasteland, with a quote from the Roman satirist Petronius. The Sybil was granted one wish by the gods. She asked for eternal life, a gift not meant for mortals. The gods gave her her wish -but without eternal youth or strength. As Pertonius imagines her, she has withered away to point where she can be kept in a small (glass?) jar as a curio. Her response to the boys, in proper Greek, is to wish that her wish be taken back. Like a mortal possessor of one of Tolkien's Great Rings, mere existence cannot confer happiness. It means "merely to go on until every moment is weariness".


*a rather free translation by the author of this post and the quote with which Eliot opens The Wasteland

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