There's an Indigo Girls song that I love, called The Girl with the Weight of the World In Her Hands...Emily sings it, I believe. The girl in the song carries so much of the world's troubles in her soul, in her eyes...Anyway, Jeanette Winterson's book Weight reminds me a great deal of that song. Winterson's novel, the second in the Canongate series that I talked about when I read Atwood's novel, is about Atlas and his punishment to bear the world, his temporary relief when Heracles comes to ask him for a favor(to pick three golden apples from his own orchard), and his eventual return to the task he must eternally endure. This story is an elongated metaphor; not only does Atlas have to carry a literally heavy world, but he also is privy to all of the world's troubles, secrets, desires. He is a lonely man, overloaded with the figurative world, but he takes it as best he can. When Heracles comes to relieve him, the task for Heracles is a challenge to his manhood, he thinks it's only going to be physically difficult, he doesn't realize that the mental burden is just as difficult if not worse. He tricks Atlas into taking the world back and then runs off to continue his playboy antics. What is also interesting, is the author herself inserts her own voice, and a bit of her own history in the narrative, drawing parallels between her life and that of Atlas...reminding us that we can't leave behind any of our pasts, and like Atlas, we carry our own worlds, past, present and future, around on our backs, waiting for someone or something to relieve us of it. I don't know how that can happen, to have someone relieve you of your own cross that you must bear...perhaps a lover can ease it, share in it...but ultimately, I believe, death is possibly, bleakly the only liberator. I have loved Winterson's style of writing and her voice for a long time, her work is so diverse...I even grab at articles that she writes for such publications as The New Yorker. What she has to say about living in a world as a marginalized person, whether as a girl growing up lesbian, Noah building an ark(a man with a dream, I guess), princesses living communally as lesbians, or breaking the expected structures in narrative voice by depicting a relationship in which you don't know whether the narrator is a boy or girl(he/she has a relationship with a woman who is married), or Atlas carrying the Earth on his shoulders, Winterson expresses such wisdom, sometimes humor and just damn good writing. Oh, there were so many many quotes that I loved. At the beginning, Atlas says "I can hear the world beginning. Time plays itself back for me. I can here the ferns uncurling from their tight rest. I can hear pools bubbling up with life. I realise I am carrying not only this world, but all possible worlds. I am carrying the world in time as well as in space. I am carrying the world's mistakes and its glories. I am carrying its potential as well as what has so far been realised.[paragraph break] As the dinosaurs crawl through my hair and volcanic eruptions pock my face, I find I am become a part of what I must bear. There is no longer Atlas and the world, there is only the World Atlas. Travel me and I am continents. I am the journey you must make" (Winterson 25). A little bitty line that made me laugh..."Even a goddess is still a woman" (Winterson 31). At one point Hera is talking to Heracles about himself...she says "'Then I will speak plainly, like a man. No hero can be destroyed by the world. His reward is to destroy himself. Not what you meet on the way, but what you are, will destroy you, Heracles'" (ibid 41). Atlas and Heracles have one of their many philosophical discussions. Heracles says he's not free. Atlas responds by saying "'There is no such thing as freedom. Freedom is a country that does not exist.' [paragraph break] 'It's home,' said Heracles. 'If home is where you want to be'" (ibid 51). Still more of course. "It is fit that a man should do his best and grapple with the world. It is meet that he should accept the challenge of his destiny. What happens when the sun reaches the highest point in the day? Is it failure for morning to become afternoon, or afternoon to turn into peaceful evening and star-bright night" (ibid 71)? And then Winterson "speaks" in her own voice..."The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of the past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behaviour. The burden is intolerable" (ibid 99). And my final quote is also from her own voice..."That's why I write fiction--so that I can keep telling the story. I return to problems I can't solve, not because I'm an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end" (ibid 137). The idea of rewriting myth is exactly that, a "new beginning, a different end." It also reminds me of how much we create our own personal myths, our stories being told and re-told in either our own voice or those of whom we have come in contact. We are at once our own storytellers, our own stories, and the subjects or peripherals in others'. If the world is a tapestry, we are all its threads. Mmmm...Fiction Junkie is still on vacation from the lists...