The Song of Achilles: Rethinking love, war and partnership
Throughout my life, reading has always been a fun, relaxing, and almost chaotic experience. I get drawn into stories very easily, and naturally my imagination runs wild and gets carried away with the words. I become wholly submerged in the character’s worlds, and they often flood into mine. Whatever sorrow, anticipation, grief or happiness I was feeling as I close the last page always seeps into my very real life.
My experience of reading Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles was all that mentioned above and more. Of all the many books I’ve journeyed with until now, nothing has compared to poetic softness of Miller’s romantic narrative.
At the core of my deeply personal response is my connection to the pure and raw love between Achilles and Patroclus. Miller’s beautifully written emotional and physical exchanges between Achilles and Patroclus had me fiercely blushing as I read each line over and over again. My fingers slowly grazing over each word, absorbing each passage and not missing a moment of the passion.
I reflect below about how I received and internalized one of our generations most beautifully written romances in The Song of Achilles.
In the Rose Quartz Cave
After all the mystique of Ancient Greece settled, what continued to draw me into Achilles and Patroclus’s love affair was the purity and innocence of how their love began.
On Mount Pelion, then pubescent Achilles’ and Patroclus’ attraction for each other was painfully obvious. The ways in which Patroclus memorized every inch of Achilles body and mechanical movements, and in turn Achilles’ confident and effortless grazes of Patroclus’ changing body. The fateful night the two tenderly and passionately made love in the rose quartz cave under the stars was nothing short of momentous.
Their time on Mount Pelion was both magical and upheaving, because it mirrored what young love feels and acts like in the throws of maturing adolescence. Young love lasts a short moment, but feels like an entire lifetime, not yet tainted by the realities of adulthood. Time is yours to spend in the throes of love, learning and exploring each other anew. Young love is fueled by a carnal curiosity about what the other feels, smells and tastes like.
Miller inadvertently recreates the readers first kiss, their first touch, and their first moments of tenderness as if we were 16 again under a starlight sky in a rose quartz cave.
“We were like gods at the dawning of the world, & our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.”
A Lifetime of Love
The Song of Achilles is more than a love story captured in a short moment of time, it is a testament to how love grows and survives over a lifetime. Their love began as an innocent childhood friendship, ignited fiercely in their youth, and eventually formed an unbreakable partnership in which they each loved and lived together through the stages of life.
To love another the way Achilles and Patroclus loved, is to find the other half of your soul in this lifetime.
“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
To Love Is To Be Afraid
While letting us into the beautiful and authentic relationship she created for Achilles and Patroclus, Miller also addresses some of our greatest fears and downfalls surrounding love.
Achilles’ prophesied death cast a shadow of fear we’re much too familiar with. An entirely real fear that the one we love the most will be taken from us too soon. The fear of facing such a tragedy, the fear of becoming permanently separated from the one we love, and above all the fear of living on without them.
Witnessing Achilles turn mad at the end was a painful reminder of how ego and pride harm us and our loved ones. I beg to argue that Achilles uncontrollable ego and pride ultimately resulted in a premature and tragic ending for the lovers. Who is to say how many more memories and moments of love and happiness were lost. Ultimately, it is a reminder that love does not have a chance to thrive in the face of ego and pride.
The Song of Achilles is not only a precious story of how love blossoms and matures over a lifetime, but a reminder that even the strongest of loves can be destroyed by ego and pride.
It is a reminder that soul mates will always find one another in this lifetime, and any lifetime thereafter.
“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.”
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