Gilgamesh by Stephen Mitchell Page B

from Gilgamesh’s first question (“Tell me, how is it that you, a mortal …”) to the end of Utnapishtim’s speech (“Now then, Gilgamesh, who will assemble … ?”). If you delete or drastically abridge the Flood story, the interval between the question and the dashing of Gilgamesh’s hopes seems far too short. But with the story continuing for as long as it does, the suspense keeps growing. We are aware that Gilgamesh is listening with absolute attention, because at any moment the way to overcome death may be revealed. We can feel his attention even the second or tenth time we read this speech, when we know that Gilgamesh won’t find his answer. And when the speech comes to its disappointing climax, we are carried on to the next incident with at least the satisfaction of knowing thewhole story. We have heard everything there is to hear about how Utnapishtim became a god. Obviously, this is not the way out.
    The story has another dramatic effect as well. It gives us a harrowing picture of the cost of Utnapishtim’s immortality; the immortality itself seems like a pallid afterthought. Hovering in the background of this narrative is an unspoken question: If you had to experience all that terror, and the death of almost every living thing, in order to be granted immortality, would it seem worth it?
    Far from being sympathetic to Gilgamesh’s anguish, Utnapish-tim is gruff, almost taunting, in the conclusion to his speech:
    â€œNow then, Gilgamesh, who will assemble the gods for
your
sake? Who will convince them to grant you the eternal life that you seek?”
    (The more Utnapishtim reveals of his crankiness and cynicism, the less attractive immortality becomes.) He proposes a test: If Gil-gamesh can overcome sleep for seven days—sleep being the likeness of death—perhaps he will be able to overcome death too. But Utnapishtim knows from the start that Gilgamesh, “worn out and ready to collapse,” will fail the test. And indeed, he falls asleep immediately. Utnapishtim says with contempt:
    â€œLook at this fellow! He wanted to live forever, but the very moment he sat down, sleep swirled over him, like a fog.”
    There is a poignant irony about this test. In the bad old days, when Gilgamesh was terrorizing the citizens of Uruk, it was a well-known fact, as Shamhat told Enkidu, that the king was “so full of life-force that he need[ed] no sleep.” Sometime after Enkidu’s arrival he lost that vitality, in the same way that Enkidu, after he made love with Shamhat, lost his life-force and could no longer run like an animal. In this too Gilgamesh and Enkidu are twins. The poem doesn’t tell us exactly when Gilgamesh began to need sleep. The first we hear of it is on the journey to the Cedar Forest, when it is a recurring element in the ritual for dreams.
    Gilgamesh sat there, with his chin on his knees, and sleep overcame him, as it does all men.
    Experiencing intimacy seems to be for Gilgamesh what experiencing sex is for Enkidu: an initiation into human vulnerability. Once he found the companion of his heart, Gilgamesh became, in effect, three-thirds human. He left behind his kinship with the “unsleeping, undy-ing” gods, just as Enkidu left behind the two-thirds of him that was animal. Unwittingly, each gave up part of his physical strength in order to know the kind of love that “an animal [or a god] can’t know.”
    After Gilgamesh fails the test, Utnapishtim’s wife, sweet where her husband is sour, suggests that they wake him up and gently send him back home. But according to Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh is a deceiver like all humans and must be shown proof that he slept, and this theseven hardening loaves provide. Gilgamesh, acknowledging his failure, cries out in a very moving and beautiful passage:
    â€œWhat shall I do, where shall I go now? Death has caught me, it lurks in my bedroom, and everywhere I look,