What Merriam-Webster says: an assembly area where animals (such as the prairie chicken) carry on display and courtship behavior.
What I’m thinking about: the bird feeders, where the male cardinals are making claims about territory and their suitability as mates.
• Source: “Lek.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster; https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lek. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.
James Agee’s “1928 Story” is about a writer who stopped writing.
I don’t think there’s anything special about writers. I’ve heard of painters who couldn’t paint and composers who couldn’t compose.
I haven’t heard of bankers who couldn’t bank or developers who couldn’t develop. But if your practice of making things is something you have to put your psyche into, you’re in trouble if yours is injured, wounded or damaged.
Agee’s character, a fellow named Irvine, who was once a writer, mainly a poet, looks back over World War II and the Depression before it. He thinks of all that was crushed during those hard times. It seems to him that only the meanness and insanity survived.
Certainly, by now, he felt no hope or trust in anything that anyone might do or say. It was a stupefied country, and evidently a stupefied world and as stupefied as anything else was his sense of universal mistrust and hopeless regret, his dependence on mere taste, his pleasure in the sensuous, his miserable reluctance to live in the world as it was, and to discard the pleasures of recall.
I think this is a story for our times. I keep telling friends who are worried about the republic that the first duty is to keep the lights own, not to lose courage, not to be overwhelmed.
If you’re a poet, one who makes poetry, now’s not the time to stop.
• Source: James Agee’s “1928 Story” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 1-19. The quotation is on pp. 2-3.
I admire Carson McCullers’s story “The Sojourner.” I think it paints a convincing picture of what regret is like. I also think that’s not easy to do.
“The Sojourner” is the story of John Ferris, who turns 38 during the story, and who has just buried his father in Georgia. Ferris is returning to Paris by way of New York. He sees his ex-wife, Elizabeth, on the street. It’s been eight years. Perhaps emotional from his father’s death, Ferris calls Elizabeth and has dinner with her and her husband and meets their son, Billy, and the new baby.
Ferris thinks of his own girlfriend and her 6-year-old son and feels inexplicably miserable.
I like this bit of dialog, which begins with Elizabeth saying that Ferris should visit again.
“You’re not going to be an expatriate, are you?”
“Expatriate,” Ferris repeated. “I don’t much like the word.”
“What’s a better word?” she asked.
He thought for a moment. “Sojourner might do.”
I’m biased because I believe there’s a connection between regret and how we live — and particularly how we go about getting rooted to a place and all the living things and that make up a place. We can be rooted there or just passing through. Or somewhere in between.
Regret is slippery, but I have felt it most when I’ve been a tourist when I should have been an inhabitant.
• Source: Carson McCullers’s “The Sojourner” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 233-24. The quotation is on p. 237.
It’s chilly in the morning as I turn over the garden beds with a spade, clearing out weeds and last year’s stubble. I also rousted a green anole, sleepy but alive, and dug up a DeKay’s brown snake that died underground during the winter. The spade turns up insects and earthworms with every turn.
Another freeze is expected, but it warms up during the day. Red-tail hawks have been soaring when the earth warms up enough to generate thermal currents. Last week, I’d hear them around 11 a.m. This week, they’re usually aloft just after 10. The earth is getting warmer.
Few things are uglier than the press corps covering a presidential campaign. I know because I was part of a mob at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 in Atlanta.
At newspapers, the traffic cop is the news editor, who rules the copy desk and thus rules on all disputes involving good English. He or she reads everything. I found the news editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and asked what story he’d like to read that the mob was not likely to cover.
He told me about Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, just down Auburn Avenue from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached. Ebenezer is a smaller church. Big Bethel is enormous. All the political stars and the press corps would be at Ebenezer. For better or worse, Dr. King’s church had become a prestigious place, and, in a way, an exclusive place. Big Bethel would be where people who drove buses and cleaned hotel rooms for a living would be. If I went to church on the Sunday before the convention began, I might learn something.
It was a long service, and I was among those standing so that others could sit. Minister after minister spoke about why people who claim to be religious can’t turn away from questions of justice. They were not concerned with arcane policy. They asked whether it’s OK to have two people doing the same job for different wages. Whether it’s OK, when you are hiring workers or admitting students to college, to exclude people because of race. The ministers asked whether someone who claims to believe in a just God could see all that and not do anything at all.
The ministers did not speak of Democrats and Republicans. In 1988, David Duke, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, was seeking the Republican nomination. Instead, the ministers at Big Bethel were looking to the Democratic Party for some kind of sign. How important was it to the party that people be treated unjustly?
Jesse Jackson was seeking the nomination, but it was clear from what the ministers and church members said that people were watching the party, not the candidate. How would the party treat the issues Jackson raised? Would the party give the agenda of equal treatment lip service or would it offer voters a sign that it was serious, perhaps by nominating Jackson for vice president?
I left the church with the impression that one segment of one community had clearly stated its hopes and expectations.
I spent the week looking for evidence that the party’s delegates understood those hopes and expectations and took them seriously.
By the end of the week, I thought the Democratic Party was in trouble.
I said that I could think of few novels that had been turned into successful films.
The Wise Woman said that a person who had, as a boy, promised his parents he’d be good if they didn’t make him go to the movies really shouldn’t venture into film criticism. She mentioned several films, including “The Maltese Falcon.”
Stung, I replied that I was thinking about the kinds of novels she’d taught in literature classes.
She queued up “Far from the Madding Crowd,” the 2015 version. I had to admit I enjoyed it.
Thomas Hardy’s novel was published, in monthly installments, in The Cornhill Magazine in 1874. I wondered whether novels written and published as serials were easier to adapt to film. I said that at least the screenwriter had parts to work with — installments, if not scenes.
The Wise Woman is not sure which is worse: to have a husband who is not interested in film or to have one who is newly interested in film.
Thomas Wolfe’s “The Far and the Near” is so short and so simple I wondered whether my high school English teacher would have counted it as a short story.
The problem is with the plot. If it has one, it amounts to this: A railroad engineer passes a farm just after 2 p.m. on his daily run and always blows the whistle. A woman always waves back. The woman has a little girl who waves too. During the story, the little girl grows into a woman. Both women always wave.
When the engineer retires, he decides that he must visit the farm. Instead of finding two women, smiling and waving, he sees two women, suspicious and fearful.
He walked away down the path and then along the road toward town, and suddenly he knew that he was an old man. His heart, which had been brave and confident when it looked along the familiar vista of the rails, was now sick with doubt and horror as it saw the strange and unsuspected visage of the earth which had always been within a stone’s throw of him, and which he had never seen or known.
A lot of what we experience about a place depends on context. When the context changes, we feel lost — we feel that we have looked without seeing, that we’ve studied a place and somehow don’t know it at all.
• Source: I found a copy of the story at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial:
https://wolfememorial.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/The-Far-and-the-Near.pdf
Each Sunday when I was a boy, a couple of men would lead the congregation in prayer. An unlettered farmer might lead the opening prayer, and a college professor might lead us as the service ended. In 1960, most of those fellows still prayed using the language of King James: thee, thou, thy and thine. Thou hast, but he hath.
The old language was especially common in country churches. But the times they were a’changin’, and the changes seemed to occur first in the cities and university towns. Language that sounded fine in the Eisenhower years sounded strange in the day of Jimi Hendrix.
The language I heard changed, and I now have to make an effort to recall it. Similarly, the technology I grew up with is gone. I can’t remember when the party line was replaced at Grandmother’s house or when the last rotary phone disappeared. I could look it up online.
With all the change, it seems odd to me that so many bad ideas survived. It’s hard to convey to young people how grateful parents were when they stood in lines to get their children vaccinated against polio. It’s hard to imagine how many men who had fought in Europe wanted their country to have some continuing presence there, to be a voice for peace and stability and a world that was prone to war and trouble.
In the time and place where I grew up, you could hear a lot of bigoted language against people who shouldn’t have had to endure it. For a while, it seemed that we were all growing up or dying off — that all that bigotry might gradually disappear in the way that language changes, so gradually you have to be paying attention to notice it.
Some folks in Tennessee plant sweet peas on Valentine’s Day, even if they have to brush the snow away. I spent the week digging out the garden beds, just so they’ll be ready whenever the Wise Woman decides to plant.
When the week began, the garden was quiet. I listened mostly to the song of my shovel. As the week progressed, the birds started singing. By the weekend, the birds were jamming. We had three species of woodpeckers in the rhythm section.
Thoreau, hearing a nuthatch in early spring, noticed that much of the nuthatch’s music sounded like the drumming of a woodpecker. It was as if the nuthatch, as a fledgling, had learned part of the score from the woodpecker. Thoreau got lost in that line of thought and said:
It was the handle by which my thoughts took firmly hold on spring.
I imagine we’ll have another cold snap. But I also found the handle.
What do people say about love?
Is it like math, which comes with prerequisites? Should a person learn how to care for a cat or dog before you presume to care for a person?
Is love systematic? Is there a science to it?
A friend and I have been exchanging notes on Carson McCuller’s story “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.”
The story is about love. It’s also about the kinds of things we say in public, and whether people think we’re drunk or crazy when we say things that are important to us.
The conversation started because The New York Times published a story about a class at Harvard where students choose a tree at the university’s arboretum for a semester. McCullers’s story is on the syllabus.
Can you learn to love a tree?
It’s an interesting question if you’re prone to thinking about place — and how a place becomes a place.
• Sources: Carson McCullers’s story was published in 1942. It was one of six stories collected with the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café in 1951. A copy is here:
https://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/A_Tree.pdf
Margaret Roach, “Starting at Harvard and Falling for Your First Tree”; The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2026. It’s here:
When E.O. Wilson was studying biology at the University of Alabama after World War II, he read an article about how European runners were better than Americans. They trained harder. Their disciplines were tougher. You could bet on it: Europeans would dominate the 1948 Olympics. A European would break the 4-minute mile.
Wilson bought a pair of surplus Army boots and started running. He thought the heavy boots would make him faster. He didn’t tell anyone about his inspiration. He just ran — for hours at a time.
It was my kind of activity: do it alone, avoid the drag of teams, have no one witness your trials and failures, until you can accomplish some exceptional feat.
Months later he tried out for the track team, lacing up spikes for the first time. He ran a mile, timed by a coach.
He wasn’t close. Determination and discipline are wonderful, but being an elite athlete is more about heredity.
Characteristically, Wilson thought about it:
The experience has often made me think more objectively about my own limitations and more generally about those of the species to with I belong. For the obsessed and ambitious, the only strategy is to probe in all directions and learn where one’s abilities are exceptional, where mediocre, where poor, then fashion tactics and prostheses to achieve the best possible result. And never give up hope that the fates will allow some unexpected breakthrough.
I’ve often wondered about education — what a good education would look like and what good educational advice would sound like. I think Wilson is right. If you are looking for a way to assess yourself, the agony of defeat is as important as the thrill of victory.
If you’re wondering what Wilson meant by “prostheses,” he had collaborators who helped with math. He was one of the most influential biologists of the 20th century, but he needed help in working out the mathematical models for his own ideas.
• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, pp. 118 and 121-2.
Crows and their kin have big brains. If you make a graph comparing the weight of various animals’ brains with their total weight, you’ll get a line that Darwin would recognize as the story of evolution. Some of the more primitive animals don’t really have brains. Mammals have larger brains. Corvids are a flier on the graph.
A guineafowl, by contrast, is a big bird with a small head — “a walnut on top of a watermelon” is the way country folks usually put it.
My grandfather kept guineafowl, and I had to help him in the seemingly hopeless task of trying to keep them alive.
The birds would walk out to the road in front of the house and be astonished by the view. No tall grass to hide food or predators. They’d stand in the road and look one way and then the other and would still be looking when they’d be flattened by a truck.
It was a dismal job for a boy, collecting the carcasses. Sometimes a big truck would take out half a dozen birds.
My grandfather was hardheaded. He kept thinking the birds would pay off, despite the losses.
Guinea hens have a two-note call, described as “pot-rack” in the South and “buck-wheat” in the North. The hens begin squawking and then slowly synchronize the two notes until they are in unison. It’s loud and unnerving.
It’s also a behavior that keeps them alive. Grandfather’s birds roosted in a chinaberry tree. No two hens would face in the same direction. If anything moved — a stray dog or a leaf blowing in the breeze — the birds would raise the alarm. They were more alert than any watchdog.
During the years my grandfather kept guineafowl, no one ever slept through the night.
Perhaps in compensation for being so helpless, these birds evolved strange superpowers. I’ve never seen anything so efficient at killing snakes. Coyotes are good. But the guineafowl exterminated snakes wherever they ranged.
The hens would be so excited when one blundered across a snake in the pasture. The word would spread, and instantly the whole flock would descend on the poor reptile.
The guineafowl were also incredible eaters of grasshoppers. I came see that the guineafowl had evolved like the prairie chicken. They were creatures of the grasslands, and the pastures of East Texas suited them.
The big grassland birds evolved to eat the insects. The plagues of locusts that destroyed crops on the Great Plains occurred after hunters killed off the prairie chicken, shipping hundreds of thousands of carcasses a year to the East Coast and on to Europe.
Texas had plenty of grasshoppers, and so my grandfather was right. The guineafowl found their niche and survived.
I’m at the point in the Greek myths where Deianeira makes her entrance. She’s best remembered as the woman who was the end of Heracles.
She loved him. He had rescued her when her father was planning to marry her off to the river God Achelous, he of the (literally) flowing beard. Deianeira imagined the wedding night as something akin to waterboarding and was praying for death when Heracles, in need of a wife, knocked on the door.
Achelous was a shapeshifter, but he only had three shapes: bull, speckled serpent and bull-headed man. Heracles didn’t have much trouble with any of those forms.
Achelous slunk off minus a horn, and the happy couple went off on their honeymoon. The newlyweds were stopped by the River Evenus, which was flooded.
The lusty Centaur Nessus was there, claiming to be the gods’ ferryman, having been awarded the post for his noble character. He promised to take Deianeira across. Heracles would have to swim.
When Nessus got to the other side and put his hands on Deianeira, she cried out, and Heracles shot Nessus from the other bank. As Nessus was dying, he told Deianeira to collect a vial of his blood as a potion. If Heracles ever had eyes for another woman, Deianeira could put the potion on his shirt and she would never have to complain about his behavior again.
Sophocles did wonders with that story.
That’s the famous story, but I got derailed by an earlier one.
Deianeira was one of the sisters of Meleager, one of the argonauts. When he died, the sisters cried so loudly that Artemis turned them into guineafowl. The goddess later relented and returned Deianeira and Gorge to human form.
My grandfather kept guineafowl, and if you’ve ever been around these birds, the memories are hard to get rid of. I have other things to think about, but my memory has been serving up nothing but guineafowl for days.
• Source and notes: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 190-5. For an earlier note, see ‘Sophocles: ‘The Women of Trachis,’ April 10, 2024. It’s here:
https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/04/sophocles-women-of-trachis.html
I know that American fiction didn’t begin with Mark Twain, but that’s about as far back as I can go.
I wish I could appreciate early American fiction, but I can’t. I’d love to read the great novel of the American Revolution written in the 1780s or the great Civil War novel written in the 1870s. I’d like to read the great American novel of our own troubled times.
This line of thought began with William Least Heat-Moon’s description of a cranky old man who told about going on a covered wagon tour, a kind of trail ride that recreated the western migration of the 1800s. The cranky old man went with a group that included a historian from the East, a likable guy who could explain the competing theories about why sensible people thought they had to leave settled lives behind and get into a covered wagon.
But the historian didn’t know how to sling a wagon. Hardwoods needed to repair wagons were scarce on the prairie, so people cut and dressed lumber and slung it under the wagon. The professor didn’t know what trees would make a decent axle or yoke. He couldn’t tell one tree from another. He didn’t know how to pack a wagon or what people carried. He had no real sense of how people cooked the evening meal.
That might suggest what I’m missing. I’ve read the primary sources — letters, diaries, newspapers — of the periods that interest me. But I haven’t read a novel that gives me the sense of the trail.
• Source: William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 421-3.
I have been taking apart William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth, trying to figure out how it works. That’s the same thing as wondering whether there’s a better way to write a book like that, and so anything I’d say about the structure of the book would sound more critical than I’d intend it to be. But no one spends so much time with a book that doesn’t intrigue him.
Least Heat-Moon called the book a deep map, and I think he delivers on the claim. It’s a map of Chase County, Kansas, which had a population of about 3,000 when Least Heat-Moon was exploring it in the 1980s.
The book has 76 chapters; 72 are in 12 sections of six chapters each. Each section is about a township in the county. Least Heat-Moon decided on that structure, following Thomas Jefferson’s plan of putting the country on a grid system.
That’s a call the next writer should second-guess. Some of the townships are more interesting than others. At least one of the townships is so empty that Least Heat-Moon fills the section with the tragic history of the Kansas, or Kaw, people, who were driven from the county to what’s now Oklahoma in 1873. That tragic story is one of the best in the book. But a reader might be aware that the story doesn’t exactly fit the structure the author chose.
Each section has six chapters, the first of which is titled “From the Commonplace Book.” Each is a collection of quotations from other writers. The introductory and concluding sections also have a “From the Commonplace Book,” along with one other chapter. So 14 of the 76 chapters, 18 percent, are collections of quotations and readings. That’s not a complaint. I thought it was closer to genius. With this kind of book, much of the story involves history. I liked the quotations from original sources.
The last chapter is a record of two friends, Least Heat-Moon and Clive “Scott” Chisholm, going on a three-day walk through the county, trying to find traces of the Kaw Trail. The trail was used by ancient hunting parties. Parts of it were incorporated into the Santa Fe Trail by people of European ancestry. And the trail was used when the Kaw people were forced to leave their homeland. It’s an interesting dialog that might remind you of the film My Dinner with Andre.
PrairyErth is a big book, 200,000 words, Least Heat-Moon says. Three times the planned length. Least Heat-Moon discusses choices he made in the writing, and he also has a section on the topics he left out. I wondered whether getting off the grid system would have allowed him to address some of them. I would have read about chiggers, dugouts and the farmer who refused electricity. I’d also like to know about hopper-dozers, Model A cars that were modified to scrape grasshoppers off crops.
If I ever get around to making a deep map, I might do a few things differently. But this is a book I admire.
• Source: William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991.
If you could invite a writer from the past to write a piece about our times, whom would you invite? I was thinking about Ralph Ellison, who lived through a lot of outrage. He said:
You see a situation which outrages you, but as you write about the characters who embody that which outrages, your sense of craft and the moral role of your craft demands that you depict those characters in the breadth of their humanity. You try to give them the density of the human rather than the narrow intensity of the demonic. That means you try to delineate them as men and women who possess feelings and ideals, no matter how much you reject their feelings and ideals.
• Source: Ralph Ellison gave an interview to John Hersey, who titled it “A Completion of Personality.” It’s in The Writer’s Craft, edited by John Hersey; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, pp. 267-82. The quotation is on p. 281.
A hawk, intent on a target in the borrow ditch, crossed the road in a dive, missing the windshield of my truck by a couple of feet.
He wasn’t big, so I’d guess young male. The Wise Woman and I saw plenty of red, so I’d guess a red-tailed hawk.
Red-tailed hawks can dive at more than 100 mph, so we barely got a glimpse. We looked at the other, doubting whether we’d seen anything at all. But when an animal that size sails that fast between the windshield and the hood ornament, all your mental notes from the walk through the woods disappear. All that’s left is awe.
Later, I thought about a remark E.O. Wilson made about how naturalists come into being. If you want to create young naturalists, put kids in front of an animal in the wild, he said. It doesn’t work if you put them in front of a textbook.
I’ve read the warnings about confusing poetry with news. But sometimes the news makes you read a poem in a different way. Here’s the beginning of Stephen Dunn’s “The Same Cold”:
In Minnesota the serious cold arrived
like no cold I’d previously experienced,
an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity
that always took me by surprise.
On blizzardly nights with wires down
or in the dead-battery dawn
the cold made good neighbors of us all,
made us moral because we might need
something moral in return, no hitchhiker
left on the road, not even some frozen
strange-looking turned away
from the door.
Dunn told how his car broke down when it was 30-below. He was saved by “a man with a candy bar and blanket,/ a man for all weather.”
It was no big thing to him, the savior.
Just two men, he said, in the same cold.
• Source: Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, p. 61-2.
In grade school, I had a teacher who thumped the ears of boys who looked out the window, daydreaming when they should have been paying attention.
I was thinking about attention — how we learn to pay attention and how we get distracted — when I ran across a story about how Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains taught their children.
Women did the harvesting, and they taught their children how to find prairie turnips. Pediomelum esculentum typically has several stems. Women taught their children that if they looked carefully at one of the stems and followed the direction it was pointing, they’d find another plant.
Of course the stems don’t grow in a direction that points to another plant. But if a child follows any direction, looking carefully, she or he likely will find another prize.
Different people teach children to pay attention in different ways. Fictions seem to work as well as facts.
• Source: The story was told by Melvin Gilmore in Prairie Smoke, published in 1929. I found it quoted in William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 218-19. The plant is also known as tipsin and breadroot. I’ve seen it in Texas but not in Georgia.
We stopped at the site of Evans Mill and hiked along Pole Bridge Creek, happy to get out of the house after the ice storm.
The enormous dog insisted on playing in the white water that once turned the grist mill. Ice still covered the creek in the eddies. It was a hard freeze, but the dog, a German, is oblivious to cold.
The trail climbs a ridge, a steep drop on both sides. The forest is typical of the Piedmont — oak, hickory, sweetgum and pine. We walked a mile without seeing a beech.
The mill was just south of Lithonia, which was once the center of the quarry business around here. It’s now a town of 2,500.
From roughly 1880 to 1920, the granite business was bigger than cotton. The granite in Lithonia is like the stone found around Stone Mountain and the other monadnocks but was easier to work. Some quarry owners brought in immigrants — quarrymen from Scotland and Wales. A lot of African Americans families were also in the business.
Village historians say that if you want to know what the stone is like, look at the campus of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A lot of it is there.
Heracles, half-god, half-man, eventually became immortal. He’s a hard guy to admire, much less love.
Yesterday’s note on the rape of Auge is the kind of story that the ancient Greeks told about the heroes and gods. Heracles did a lot of good, but he murdered, plundered and raped as he went along.
As a schoolboy, I learned Heracles was assigned a series of impossible tasks to atone for killing his wife and children in a fit of madness. But the lesson stopped there. Had the story continued, I’d have learned that Heracles was slow to learn.
Having completed his labors, Heracles killed yet another man and, as penance, consented to be sold into slavery for a year. He was bought by Omphale, queen of Lydia.
She was looking for sex, not the usual labor that heroes provided. Heracles, being Heracles, rid the country of bandits and killed a giant, marauding serpent.
But if you were writing a biography of the god, this chapter would be “Heracles: the sex-slave period.” This chapter is not taught in schools.
I’ve been thinking about the gods, trying to find something in the world that I know that I could compare them to.
Greek thinkers had different views of the gods. One was that a god was a kind of force you neither loved nor hated but simply accepted because you couldn’t do anything about it. I heard Old Timers in Texas speak of the Neches Rivers that way. People lived by the river because they needed the water. But it flooded often, carrying away kin and cattle, and occasionally the house.
• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 162-8.
In ancient Athens, if you said something awful, you might get treated to “the silence of Telephus.”
It was a profound silence. Telephus himself was so disturbed he didn’t speak for years.
Telephus was the unwanted grandson of King Aleus of Tegea, a city unfortunately close to Sparta. Aleus was informed by the Oracle at Delphi that his beloved wife’s two brothers would die at the hands of her daughter’s son.
So Aleus had his daughter, Auge, appointed priestess of Athene, a position that required chastity. Aleus threated to kill Auge if she failed to keep her vows.
Heracles, drunk, raped her in the temple.
Aleus, blaming the victim when he noticed she was pregnant, asked a friend to drown Auge since he couldn’t muster the nerve to kill her himself. The friend agreed but planned to sell her, the market for slaves being what it was.
Before Auge could be sold, she had the child who became Telephus and hid him on a mountainside.
In Greek myths, kindly shepherds find all the children who are exposed on mountainsides and take them to childless kings. Telephus was raised well, but when he got older he wanted to find his parents. He asked the oracle, which sent him to Asia to consult a king. The oracle did not mention that Auge had fallen into the hands of this kindly king, who had married her.
On the way, Telephus got into a scrape with a couple of louts and killed them.
The day when Telephus found his mother was a day of great joy and a day of great sorrow. Auge was mourning the death of her brothers. That was the day Telephus retreated into silence.
• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 186-90. The myth has many variations.
