The Last Song of Orpheus

4

I will try to tell the tale in what you, poor mortal Musaeus, would think of as the proper fashion, a beginning, a middle, an end, although you must attempt to understand that for me such concepts have very little meaning.

I will tell, all in proper order, of my visit to Egypt, and of my kingship in Thrace, and my voyage to Colchis with the Argonauts, and of such other things as are harmonious parts of my tale. But I should begin with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, since that is the one for which I am best known.

That story begins when I was still only an idle wandering princeling and maker of pretty songs. A time came when the gods decided that I needed to know love, which until then had been absent from my life. Nobler music was required of me than I as yet had the art to create, and for that it was necessary for me to experience love. Love, after all, is the great force that drives creation, and what can be more important to the gods than creation, which is the reason for their own existence? How could I sing of love without knowing it? For me to sing of it in a true way I needed to know what it was, truly to know, and so the gods in their infinite wisdom led me to Eurydice. And the gods decreed also that I had to learn not only love but the suffering that comes with the loss of one’s beloved, and to experience the redemption that comes after the most acute and profound pain.

So the gods gave me Eurydice; or, rather, they placed Eurydice in my path and caused me to choose her, although I believed then that I was choosing her of my own free will. Let us say that I did choose her of my own free will, since I know that there are those who believe that such a thing as free will actually exists in this universe. Why, then, you might ask me, would I choose Eurydice, above all other women?

And I would tell you that I perceived her as song made flesh, and there is nothing I love more than song.