The Double Tongue by William Golding

Author:William Golding
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780571267422
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 1995-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

VI

It would be wearisome to recount the monthly festivals of the oracle and my descent into the grotto, once so feared and never entirely discounted. I did sometimes give an answer in hexameters though that was never easy. It required a certain elevation of the spirit though it caused a greater stir than I was aware of at the time. The fact was that this kind of versified answer had not been used for generations. When the news reached Athens that the Pythia was using Apollo’s own language again, if only now and then, there was a whole new reason for visiting the oracle. Presently Ionides began to limit his own emendations and gave the enquirers what I had said straight. I was flattered by this and indeed I still think some of the answers were felicitous but I shall not repeat them. Ionides did on several occasions threaten to ‘publish’ them in a book. There are a number of collections of our sayings – not mine, the oracle’s – which I suppose you could say had been ‘published’ through the generations, though the Foundation was in possession of the only copies and did not allow unauthorized perusal. That was what Perseus said, ‘unauthorized perusal’. I don’t know why I found the phrase so funny and used it so often that Ionides remarked I was becoming a bore. I found after my first terrifying descent into the grotto that I still felt the awe one finds on entering a temple or even when standing before it in a state of what the Foundation calls ‘recollection’. It seemed to me that after his first – I shall dare to call it ‘rape’ of me, that he had thought that enough was enough, and broken in as I was I could now be ridden with the gentlest of touches. It made me understand that play of Euripides better than the poet himself had done! Indeed, when I saw it – for I had to sit by the priest of Dionysus at the dramatic representations – I wept behind my veilings and could not tell whether it was in joy or sorrow. These are mysteries. It may be, as Ionides used to say in his really cynical days, that all these old legends do not conceal and shadow forth profound religious truths but rather they state bluntly the great human truths which may be as valuable. But I think Ionides was changing. I detected in what he said sometimes the suggestion that all religions were not foolish nor their customs, and that the cosmos which we inhabited was a stranger place than people sometimes thought. We must not, he once said, take our modern wisdom for granted as a final thing.

After the festival of that first month I was astonished not just by the number of presents left for me but by their variety. I have said, I think, how rich were those left by the two young Romans. But the others ranged all the way down, if that is the right direction, to some vegetables and a dead hare.

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