Phantom Zet

“That is how things go. You fix them, and they go awry, and then you fix them again.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“A conversation between Telemachus & Circe:

"That is how things go. You fix them, and they go awry, and then you fix them again.”
“You have a patient temper.”
“My father called it dullness. Shearing, cleaning out the hearths, pitting olives. He wanted to know how to do such things for curiosity’s sake, but he did not want to actually have to do them.”
It was true. Odysseus’ favorite task was the sort that only had to be performed once: raiding a town, defeating a monster, finding a way inside an impenetrable city.
“Perhaps you get it from your mother.” He did not look up, but I thought I saw him tense.
“How is she? I know you speak to her.”
“She misses you.”
“She knows where I am.”
The anger stood out plain and clean on his face. There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. [Odysseus] would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe