Josh Saunders’s Reviews > Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold > Status Update

I locked Orual up or laid her asleep as best I could deep down inside me; she lay curled there. It was like being with child, but reversed; the thing I carried in me grew slowly smaller and less alive

I understood why men become drunkards. Got the way it worked in me was - not at all that it blotted out these sorrows - but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them. I was a great, sad queen in song. I did not check the big tears that rose in my eyes. I enjoyed them. To say all, I was drunk; I played the fool.

Hitherto, like all my countrywomen, I had gone bareface; on those two journeys up the Mountain I had word a veil because I wished to be secret. I now determined that I would go always veiled. I have kept this rule, within doors and without, ever since. It is a sort of treaty made with my ugliness. There had been a time in childhood when I didn’t yet know I was ugly.

A Greek verse says that even the gods cannot change the past. But is this true? He made it as if, from the beginning, I had known that Psyche’s lover was a god, and as if all my doubtings, fears, guessing, debating, questionings of Bardia, questionings of the Fox, all the rummage and business of it, had been trumped-up foolery, dust blown in my eyes by myself.

Everyone loved me once I was dead. But I am ashamed to write all these follies.