shame even for a man to be seen naked.’
But a man as mad in love as Candaules was in love, a man who had committed the folly of falling in love with his own wife, who found her nakedness too beautiful for himself to gaze on all alone, such a man knows shame only to court it. The greater wrong it was for a Lydian woman to be seen naked, the greater the necessity for Candaules to bring that wrong about.
I don’t condone it. I tremble before its imperatives as he must have done, that’s all.
Though the story isn’t officially over until the queen discovers what has happened and delivers Gyges her fearful ultimatum – kill him or die yourself – it’s over for me the moment Gyges sees, as I imagine it, how right Candaules was to estimate his wife ’s beauty so highly. For those who like a moral, the moral is on the side of modesty. But for me it is not a cautionary fable about impudicity. For me it is a tragedy. What is a husband to do when his wife ’s beauty is such that he cannot find enough ways of honouring it?
None of this, as I have said, meant anything to me when I was sixteen. Yes, Faith had sought the kisses of another boy, and I could still taste something scalding sweet sluicing through my stomach when I remembered it, but I made no connections. I read the story Victor had marked for me, saw it as an attempt to put a classical gloss on lewd and dishonourable behaviour, blushed a few more times for my own close shave with shame, and thought no more about it. But that doesn’t mean it was not all the time quietly eating at my soul, preparing me, without my knowledge, for Marisa.
Had I known what its effects would be I would have thanked Victor in person.
Not that those thanks would ever have reached him. About two months after my visit a fire consumed the house in Cookham. Neither Victor nor Joyce Gowan survived it. The fire took everything – the people, the photographs, the paintings, and all that had been left of Victor’s library.
THIS IS NOT, IN THE CONVENTIONAL SENSE AT LEAST, A FAMILY STORY. IF anything it is an anti-family story, the whole point of me, I have come to understand, being the example I set of how a man might win freedom from the evolutionary imperative. Never mind, I say, what happens to your seed. Let others overleap yours with their own if their biology dictates it. My seed is going nowhere. This is how I answer Marius who thought mankind was finished. Behold in me the promise of a brave new humanity, heroically careless of selection or extinction, come out of Darwin’s swamp at last.
So how does this heroic new humanity continue?
Questions, questions. It isn’t only the cuckold who’s forever wanting an answer to the question what happens next.
We stand on midgets’ shoulders – that’s how we prosper. We continue because we are parasitic on life ’s common seed-bearers. And ‘Your parasite,’ as Mosca, parasite of Volpone exults, ‘Is a most precious thing, dropped from above, / Not bred’mongst clods and clodpolls here on earth.’
Similarly your cuckold: callous, vain, as slippery as an eel, but a most precious thing. An example to future men, for the very reason that no future can proceed from us. We burn up like the phoenix. What’s bad in us, dies with us. We have no followers and belong to no sects. And we are fools to no belief systems, unless a wife is a belief system.
But I come from family even if I won’t be having one of my own, and I don’t think I compromise my exemplary refusal of evolution by sayinga little more about the family firm of which I am the sole director. Though my father opposed my taking over the business, crediting me with no aptitude for any line of work other than ‘weeping into pillows’, my uncles honoured me with a trust I went out of my way to justify, even long after they’d died and my father was declined into a life of weeping into pillows and otherwise wetting beds himself, playing canasta in an old persons’ home
But a man as mad in love as Candaules was in love, a man who had committed the folly of falling in love with his own wife, who found her nakedness too beautiful for himself to gaze on all alone, such a man knows shame only to court it. The greater wrong it was for a Lydian woman to be seen naked, the greater the necessity for Candaules to bring that wrong about.
I don’t condone it. I tremble before its imperatives as he must have done, that’s all.
Though the story isn’t officially over until the queen discovers what has happened and delivers Gyges her fearful ultimatum – kill him or die yourself – it’s over for me the moment Gyges sees, as I imagine it, how right Candaules was to estimate his wife ’s beauty so highly. For those who like a moral, the moral is on the side of modesty. But for me it is not a cautionary fable about impudicity. For me it is a tragedy. What is a husband to do when his wife ’s beauty is such that he cannot find enough ways of honouring it?
None of this, as I have said, meant anything to me when I was sixteen. Yes, Faith had sought the kisses of another boy, and I could still taste something scalding sweet sluicing through my stomach when I remembered it, but I made no connections. I read the story Victor had marked for me, saw it as an attempt to put a classical gloss on lewd and dishonourable behaviour, blushed a few more times for my own close shave with shame, and thought no more about it. But that doesn’t mean it was not all the time quietly eating at my soul, preparing me, without my knowledge, for Marisa.
Had I known what its effects would be I would have thanked Victor in person.
Not that those thanks would ever have reached him. About two months after my visit a fire consumed the house in Cookham. Neither Victor nor Joyce Gowan survived it. The fire took everything – the people, the photographs, the paintings, and all that had been left of Victor’s library.
THIS IS NOT, IN THE CONVENTIONAL SENSE AT LEAST, A FAMILY STORY. IF anything it is an anti-family story, the whole point of me, I have come to understand, being the example I set of how a man might win freedom from the evolutionary imperative. Never mind, I say, what happens to your seed. Let others overleap yours with their own if their biology dictates it. My seed is going nowhere. This is how I answer Marius who thought mankind was finished. Behold in me the promise of a brave new humanity, heroically careless of selection or extinction, come out of Darwin’s swamp at last.
So how does this heroic new humanity continue?
Questions, questions. It isn’t only the cuckold who’s forever wanting an answer to the question what happens next.
We stand on midgets’ shoulders – that’s how we prosper. We continue because we are parasitic on life ’s common seed-bearers. And ‘Your parasite,’ as Mosca, parasite of Volpone exults, ‘Is a most precious thing, dropped from above, / Not bred’mongst clods and clodpolls here on earth.’
Similarly your cuckold: callous, vain, as slippery as an eel, but a most precious thing. An example to future men, for the very reason that no future can proceed from us. We burn up like the phoenix. What’s bad in us, dies with us. We have no followers and belong to no sects. And we are fools to no belief systems, unless a wife is a belief system.
But I come from family even if I won’t be having one of my own, and I don’t think I compromise my exemplary refusal of evolution by sayinga little more about the family firm of which I am the sole director. Though my father opposed my taking over the business, crediting me with no aptitude for any line of work other than ‘weeping into pillows’, my uncles honoured me with a trust I went out of my way to justify, even long after they’d died and my father was declined into a life of weeping into pillows and otherwise wetting beds himself, playing canasta in an old persons’ home
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