Eurydice

When I’m not in the hospital, I, like many of you, have been socially distant. I was texting one of my friends today who told me about a walking date she went on with the man she’s been seeing. At some point in their walk, they stood, 6 feet apart, staring into each other’s eyes and longing for physical touch.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was a musician—the greatest voice in the land, etc. as the epithets, go—and his wife, Eurydice dies. (There are variations in the myths surrounding the cause of her death, but anyway, she dead.)

So Orpheus goes to Hades, the Lord of the Underworld, and he sings for him and begs him to bring her back. And Hades, shockingly, agrees, on one condition: for the entirety of the journey back to the land of the living, Orpheus is not allowed to look at her.

So Orpheus sets off on his journey back from whence he came. And as they go, step by step, away from hell and towards the land of the living, Eurydice becomes less and less of a ghost and more and more alive. He starts to hear her footsteps and the rustle of her clothes and the smell of her hair. And he wants to look at her so badly. He’s exhausted, scared, sleep deprived, and he is literally walking through hell. And just as he reaches the River Styx, he can’t stand it. He turns around, and he looks at her.

(And I always imagine that, in this moment, he found her just as stunning as the day she died, that she is vibrant and tantalizing, that she smiles because she, too, hadn’t seen his face after all this time.)

And then she vanishes. And Orpheus returns to the land of the living, alone. That, to me, is one of the most beautiful, anguishing moments in the Western Canon. What was Orpheus thinking? What does it feel like to come so close yet completely fuck up and ruin everything? And would he do it again?

But here’s the first thing: people don’t tell the story from Eurydice’s perspective. What is it like to die and then have a second chance at life, but the person you depend on has literally one job, and they screw up?

I think there are obvious ways in which the myth parallels for our current circumstances. Social distancing is essentially abandoning the world of the living—the physical and social companionship that keep us alive—to walk, alone, in the land of the dead, not knowing when or how it will all end, all the while craving the very things that make us human.

(Myths seem to fixate on moments like these: transgressions, and their consequences. Call it fate. But that’s neither here nor there.)

So here’s the second thing: we’re not all Orpheus. Most of us are, but not all of us. Some of us are Eurydice. Which completely blows, but so it goes. And the Eurydices are counting on the Orpheuses in the world to not mess up.