Just Reread The Song Of Achilles, Haven’t Stopped Thinking About Patroclus Committing Achilles To Memory

Just reread the song of achilles, haven’t stopped thinking about Patroclus committing Achilles to memory in the crystal cave with “Achilles' eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know it in dark or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness,” and later when Achilles is whisked to Scyros and Patroclus crosses the sea to find him and recognizes Achilles among the dancers and thinks to himself “Had she really thought I would not know him? I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world,” and when the Greek army finally arrives in Troy, Patroclus admires the walled city from a distance and “Later, I would see those walls up close, their sharp squared stones perfectly cut and fitted against each other, the work of the god Apollo, it was said. And I would wonder at them at how, ever, the city could be taken. For they were too high for siege towers, and too strong for catapults, and no sane person would ever try to climb their sheer, divinely smoothed face,” and a decade later he’s driven to that very act of madness by grief and violent desperation “I leap from the chariot and run to the walls. My fingers find slight hollows in the stone, like blind eye-sockets. Climb. My feet seek infinitesimal chips in the god-cut rocks. I am not graceful, but scrabbling, my hands clawing against the stone before they cling. Yet I am climbing,” and when Patroclus proves so fearsome that Apollo is forced to intervene and send Patroclus to his death, “The last thing I think is: Achilles,” and after the war when he finally joins Achilles in the underworld, “In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun,” and how Patroclus kept his promise to recognize Achilles in death, in madness, in darkness, at the end of the world.

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