Status Updates From Lavinia

"Dark one, dear one, wife, girl, queen, my Italian, my love." We made love, rather hastily and with a good deal of laughter at first, but with a rising wild passion, so that at the height of it I felt that he had made me one with the sea and its tides and its deeps. When we came back to the world he lay there on the sand. He was so beautiful I touched his face with my fingertips, and he lay half asleep in sunlight.

A portent occurred in Laurentum: the doors of the War Gate swung open of themselves.

People came to Janus' altar and found the gates hanging ajar. The bolts of the iron hasps that held in place the great locking beam had rusted through, so that the hasps gave way and let the beam drop. The hinges also were rusted and askew, so that the gates could not be closed.

Latinus was gravely troubled by the omen.

i have a lot of thoughts about this book but one thing i’ll say is that if ursula k le guin recognized aeneas/achates and ascanius’ homosexuality you can too

It’s like reading the Iliad and the Aeneid stirred in with an undiscovered myth about Aeneas’s Latin lover who Virgil begrudges words that might enchant and beguile us - but here with our Virgil Le Guin and her poetic and powerful voice we are definitely enchanted and entranced 💫

The most magnificent book. The most magnificent writing. It’s as if Homer and Virgil and goddess Diana and Ursula had gotten together to write Lavinia 🩷

The presence of the trees was very strong. The first time I wondered if I might hear the voice that my father heard speak from among them in the dark. The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion. I went back to the sacred enclosure praying, beseeching these great powers to have pity on my weakness. I was glad I had lit no fire.

Lavinia is a badass

Ascanius, Telemachus, Neoptolemus; disappointing/awful failsons are apparently a tale as old as time.