Beautiful and quotable – Antinous was dead.

In the process of writing lyrics, I’ve been doing an awful lot of critical listening, and I’ve been reading a lot of other people’s lyrics. “Awful” because this is work – it’s critical listening, not enjoyment. Believe me, there are good reasons why some artists do not automatically include the lyrics when they publish their songs. (That’s what Shazam is for.)

However, while battling through all this, I’ve (re)discovered the most beautiful, and most significant, prose and poetry. At times, all you need is a little quote to get you into a new book, or reading the work of a new writer.

So, from now on, I’ll share with you my favourite, most inspirational, most quotable quotes, as I randomly get to them. Enjoy! (But discover the rest for yourself.)

The first one is Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar.

Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar

Why this one? As historical fact, the Emperor Hadrian had a relationship with a young man called Antinous. In this chapter, Antinous kills himself, and Hadrian is heartbroken and, in the actual meaning of the word, devastated. Yourcenar describes his grief here, and notice how, again and again, she draws the reader back to the simple, terrible words: “Antinous was dead”. These parts of the book are the most moving, and most compelling, descriptions of love and grief that I’ve ever read.

“I had not seen Plotina die. Attianus had died; he was old. During the Dacian wars I had lost comrades whom I had believed that I loved ardently; but we were young, and life and death were equally intoxicating and easy. Antinous was dead. I remembered platitudes frequently heard: ‘One can die at any age,’ or ‘They who die young are beloved by the gods.’ I myself had shared in that execrable abuse of words; I had talked of dying of sleep, and dying of boredom. I had used the word agony, the word mourning, the word loss. Antinous was dead.

Love, wisest of gods…But love had not been to blame for that negligence, for the harshness and indifference mingled with passion like sand with the gold borne along by a stream, for that blind self-content of a man too completely happy, and who is growing old. Could I have been so grossly satisfied? Antinous was dead. Far from loving too much, as doubtless Severianus was proclaiming at that moment in Rome, I had not been loving enough to force the boy to live on.”
Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, p. 172
First published in French in 1951, as Mémoires d’Hadrien. This edition is the translation from the French by Grace Frick, published in 1986 by Penguin Books.