characteristic more realistically charged with that person’s predominant effect upon others than any other attribute. In the case of the aged Odysseus this was his beard. If the wily old warrior had any special personal vanity or anything about his appearance upon which he himself especially concentrated it was his beard.
To get the effect that pleased him over this beard of his it had become necessary for him not only to trim it with the utmost care but to shave off or cut away all the hair on the portions of his face other than those that served him as a stage for this dramatic emphasis upon his beard.
As he now leaned out into that hollow sap-scented darkness holding his blazing torch, his beard was emphasized precisely in the way that satisfied this one queer streak of personal vanity in him. It was no wonder then that the old Dryad’s appeal to him to come down those wooden steps, for they were much more than a ladder, and listen closely to what she wanted him to hear became an appeal that he felt to be irresistible, for in certain deep and narrow mole-runs in their nature the personal vanity of god-like men surpasses by a hundred-fold the natural vanity of women. But there was more in this than that. There was a queer psychicobsession in it; for once when, in middle manhood, and under the influence of this rather eccentric vanity of his, and of the method he had deliberately adopted for trimming it, his beard showed signs of taking the shape he desired for it, his mother Antikleia cried out to him when she caught sight of him emerging clean and fresh from a bath: “By the gods, boy, your beard is as pointed as the prow of a ship!” and, as it chanced, in flinging out this casual remark she proved she had read, as mothers sometimes, though not often, can read, what had hardly been known to himself, the hidden urge behind what he was doing to his face.
“O why is it,” he groaned to himself, this wily old sacker of cities, and enslaver of their defenders’ wives, “that we mortals have the power of re-creating our actual appearance with which we confront the sun and the moon? Animals and birds can’t do it though they can rejoice in the change or lament over the change when it’s done for them!”
If it had been some special competition of opposite odours during that February night, as they hovered round his home, some of them unspeakably exquisite, some of them revoltingly excremental, a few actually sepulchral, that swept his memory back at that moment to his mother’s words about the way he trimmed his beard, he was still descending that wooden flight of stairs, when a gust of wind from the sea whirled away from above both himself and Kleta’s oak a thick veil of mist, leaving in sight not only several zodiacal constellations, but among them, and yet not among them, such a shy, timid, lonely, brittle, shell-like crescent, that the idea of the Moon as she was before Artemis meddled with her, or Apollo meddled with the sun, whirled into his heavy skull.
This same gust of wind, not satisfied with making him aware that his disturbed sleep was connected with the fact that they were now in “noumenia” or the beginning of the month, brought from far-away, across rocks and deserts and forests and seas, in fact from the entrance to Hades itself a vision so strange that he paused in his descent, and holding his torch at arm’s length, sothat its flame shouldn’t touch the protruding point of this same bowsprit-beard, shut both his deep-socketed, widely-separated eyes, and drew in his breath in such a gasping sigh that it was as if he were swallowing his own soul.
What that wind brought to him, as it revealed under those far-off stars that tiny crescent was nothing less than the glimpse he had in Hades of the ghost of Herakles himself, glaring round him like black night with his fingers on the string of his bow, while round about him whirled flocks upon flocks upon flocks of birds in feathered panic, their
To get the effect that pleased him over this beard of his it had become necessary for him not only to trim it with the utmost care but to shave off or cut away all the hair on the portions of his face other than those that served him as a stage for this dramatic emphasis upon his beard.
As he now leaned out into that hollow sap-scented darkness holding his blazing torch, his beard was emphasized precisely in the way that satisfied this one queer streak of personal vanity in him. It was no wonder then that the old Dryad’s appeal to him to come down those wooden steps, for they were much more than a ladder, and listen closely to what she wanted him to hear became an appeal that he felt to be irresistible, for in certain deep and narrow mole-runs in their nature the personal vanity of god-like men surpasses by a hundred-fold the natural vanity of women. But there was more in this than that. There was a queer psychicobsession in it; for once when, in middle manhood, and under the influence of this rather eccentric vanity of his, and of the method he had deliberately adopted for trimming it, his beard showed signs of taking the shape he desired for it, his mother Antikleia cried out to him when she caught sight of him emerging clean and fresh from a bath: “By the gods, boy, your beard is as pointed as the prow of a ship!” and, as it chanced, in flinging out this casual remark she proved she had read, as mothers sometimes, though not often, can read, what had hardly been known to himself, the hidden urge behind what he was doing to his face.
“O why is it,” he groaned to himself, this wily old sacker of cities, and enslaver of their defenders’ wives, “that we mortals have the power of re-creating our actual appearance with which we confront the sun and the moon? Animals and birds can’t do it though they can rejoice in the change or lament over the change when it’s done for them!”
If it had been some special competition of opposite odours during that February night, as they hovered round his home, some of them unspeakably exquisite, some of them revoltingly excremental, a few actually sepulchral, that swept his memory back at that moment to his mother’s words about the way he trimmed his beard, he was still descending that wooden flight of stairs, when a gust of wind from the sea whirled away from above both himself and Kleta’s oak a thick veil of mist, leaving in sight not only several zodiacal constellations, but among them, and yet not among them, such a shy, timid, lonely, brittle, shell-like crescent, that the idea of the Moon as she was before Artemis meddled with her, or Apollo meddled with the sun, whirled into his heavy skull.
This same gust of wind, not satisfied with making him aware that his disturbed sleep was connected with the fact that they were now in “noumenia” or the beginning of the month, brought from far-away, across rocks and deserts and forests and seas, in fact from the entrance to Hades itself a vision so strange that he paused in his descent, and holding his torch at arm’s length, sothat its flame shouldn’t touch the protruding point of this same bowsprit-beard, shut both his deep-socketed, widely-separated eyes, and drew in his breath in such a gasping sigh that it was as if he were swallowing his own soul.
What that wind brought to him, as it revealed under those far-off stars that tiny crescent was nothing less than the glimpse he had in Hades of the ghost of Herakles himself, glaring round him like black night with his fingers on the string of his bow, while round about him whirled flocks upon flocks upon flocks of birds in feathered panic, their
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