“It would be too lonely for me,” he said. “It’s lonely enough at sea. I look for a sign of land, a strip of floating bark, land bird or turtle. I look...there at the bow I’m always looking...now it will be you, ahead, in the sea. At sea I have my crew...no, I couldn’t be a shepherd. But you?”

“For me, I’d have more time to think, to write, to gather the world of still­ness. I could weave it into a pattern we’d recognize as important: succor, inspi­ration, hope. There is a cliff...you know it... the Leucadian cliff... I’d go there with my flock and dream as they fed about me, the sea below us, the murmur of antiquity around us.

P

It wasn’t easy to visit Alcaeus and hear him talk, as he reclined at supper, his hands close to a lighted lamp, restless fingers, perturbed in a blunted way: the tensility of the battlefield gone from them: moving, they move in on themselves.

“Sometimes, I want to see a face...your face, Sappho. I want to see many faces, the faces of my men. I’d like to see a helmet and plume, the scarlet horse­hair plume...color...what a great thing...

“My house has no window or door. Who wants a house that way?

“What of other blind men and their darkness! What good can that darkness do them?

“When my father was small he was scared of the dark. I never was. But this dark has become fear...words can’t break it. Only sleep breaks it. When I’m lying in bed, on the verge of waking, I think, remembering the old light, I think, the sun’s up. But where’s the sun!”

Someone had dusted his shields and spears on the wall: I noticed the black point of an Egyptian lance, the cold grey pennons on a Persian hide: perhaps they had decorated the sand outside his tent.

This contrast troubled me and yet I longed to share my happiness: the child in me wanted to discountenance reason: the brown shoulders and rolling sea never left me as we talked and I tried to comfort, reminding him of days when it was fun to climb the hills and explore the beaches, fun all day: he admitted there had been time without pain and wondered why we were eventually cheated?