Bokelskere.no

The tales in Metamorphoses rarely ended happily; the process of transformation, of hands turning into claws and feathers sprouting on shoulders, was sometimes a punishment, and sometimes a reprieve. But mostly it was a compromise of some sort, a way to negotiate the chasm between desire and mortality, between human nature and human need.

My father always used to lecture me on the difference between myth and legend and history. Myths were ‘imaginary’, legends were ‘unverifiable’, and history was ‘fact’, and anyone who mixed them up, he liked to say, was a sentimental fool.

I told her how my father used to read to me; I told her how for a while I had lived in a world in which trees spoke and gods flew, and how I thought that if I waited long enough things would get marvelous like they did in the stories Ovid told, and become something else.