Scylla Quotes

ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.

My aim is not to provide excuses for black behavior or to absolve blacks of personal responsibility. But when the new black conservatives accent black behavior and responsibility in such a way that the cultural realities of black people are ignored, they are playing a deceptive and dangerous intellectual game with the lives and fortunes of disadvantaged people. We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live. By overlooking these circumstances, the new black conservatives fall into the trap of blaming black poor people for their predicament. It is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims perspective.

My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now, we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us an end to this as well. You've threaded the rocks resounding with Scylla's howling rabid dogs, and taken the brunt of the Cyclops' boulders, too. Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear. A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Bear up. Save your strength for better times to come.

I lift up my voices and shatter the night with my emptiness, my heartlessness. With nothing now to bind me, the world is a hunting ground. - Scylla

(S)ome people go through their whole life just having one-night stands with the same person.

As their song crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that the world, which I had considered the province of meaningless chances, a mad dance of atoms, was as orderly as the hexagons in the honeycombs I had just crushed into wax and that behind everything, from Helen's weaving to Circe's mountain to Scylla's death, was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack.

Making mathematics accessible to the educated layman, while keeping high scientific standards, has always been considered a treacherous navigation between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public misunderstanding.

Beautiful Scylla, dainty-doe Scylla, Scylla with her viper heart. Why had she done such a thing? It was not love, I had seen the sneer in her eyes when she spoke

My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own. I have tried to keep to a register that is recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang.

Some lioness whelped you on a mountain rock In Libya, or else you're Scylla's child Whose womb's all barking dogs, for only a wild Beast with the nature of a beast could mock A desperate man making a last appeal Down on his knees. Bitch heart too hard to feel!

It was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical conclusion, scepticism.

In America, our girlfriends teach us what love, trust, and desire are; they hold our hands as we navigate the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of culture. With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else—family, lovers, husbands, or children—we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because—and this is the meat of the matter—it’s hard work to be a woman.

But it must be borne in mind that, if there is a Scylla before me, there is also a Charybdis - and that, in my fear of being read as a jest, I may incur the darker destiny of not being read at all.

that prudence of yours makes you veer about, determined not to commit yourself to either side, but to pass safely between Scylla and Charybdis; with the result that, finding yourself battered and buffeted by the waves in the midst of the sea, you assert everything you deny and deny everything you assert.

Steering between the Scylla of too much and the Charybdis of not-enough, he’d worked hard to project a retiring asexuality. As far as his coworkers knew, he lived with only his books for company. Still, he relished her name in his mouth. “Regan.

Physically, men are of the same species; spiritually each is a species apart

There’s almost no place where you won’t find Scyllas, ravening Celaenos, man-eating Laestrygones and such-like horrors,8 but wise and well-instructed

Quid Syrtes aut Scylla mihi, quid vasta Charybdis profuit?

Fancy me between Scylla and Charybdis.

I began to see that nymph Scylla everywhere.

We are the scylla sisters. We love each other so much though sometimes it hurts and sometimes it is joy and always together. We love each other. Because no one else will.

I left poor Scylla in a niche and fled. My fever’d parchings up, my scathing dread Met palsy half way: soon these limbs became 640 Gaunt, wither’d, sapless, feeble, cramp’d, and lame.

Dextrum Scylla latus, laevum implacata Charybdis obsidet, atque imo barathri ter gurgite vastos sorbet in abruptum fluctus, rursusque sub auras erigit alternos et sidera verberat unda.

He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.

Down the Woodstock Road towards them an elderly, abnormally thin man was pedalling, his thin white hair streaming in the wind and sheer desperation in his eyes. Immediately behind him, running for their lives, came Scylla and Charybdis; behind them, a milling, shouting rout of undergraduates, with Mr Adrian Barnaby (on a bicycle) well in the van; behind them, the junior proctor, the University Marshal, and two bullers, packed into a small Austin car and looking very elect, severe and ineffectual; and last of all, faint but pursuing, lumbered the ungainly form of Mr Hoskins.

Basically, if the author is totally un-educated, then the text won't bring out his best. Normal, educated people always understand that. But here's the thing—when the author is very highly-educated, the result is the same: the text turns out sub-par. Like if Charybdis was an uneducated cannibal, and Scylla was a sophisticated gourmand. Real literature snakes between the two. Like Hera's hair.

There is a staggering of outcomes to achieve, a point off which to tip the industry, a rudder with which to steer these ships between the Scylla of one doom and the Charybdis of another, onto a course that leads to Garden.

In the Hellenistic period, Scylla was identified with the rock of logic, while Charybdis was identified with the abyss of mysticism. One must sail between—as these are all instructions for moving down through the middle, between each pair of opposites.

I waited. I still hoped Glaucos would think of me. I would have married him in a moment. But I found myself hoping for another thing too, which I would not have believed the day before: that he would weep all the salt in his veins for Scylla’s return, holding fast to her as his one, true love.

Madeline Bassett is the Charybdis to Florence Craye’s Scylla. Just as deadly to the seafaring community, but offering a subtly different form of death by drowning. Whereas Florence dashes you on the rocks of her intellectual disapproval, Madeline engulfs you in a sentimental whirlpool of froth.

I was adrift on the high seas, but my course was becoming clear. It lay between the scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking charybdis of my family. Veering toward scylla seemed much the safer route, and after navigating the passage, I soon washed up, a bit stunned, on a new shore. Like Odysseus on the island of the cyclops, I found myself facing a "being of colossal strength and ferocity, to whom the law of man and god meant nothing." In true heroic fashion, I moved toward the thing I feared. Yet while Odysseus schemed desperately to escape Polyphemus's cave, I found that I was quite content to stay here forever.

In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one's life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two antithetical social dangers: You are always afraid you may get to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know somebody who does not want to know you.

Scylla was not born a monster. I made her.” His face was in the fire’s shadows. “How did it happen?” There was a piece of me that shouted its alarm: if you speak he will turn gray and hate you. But I pushed past it. If he turned gray, then he did. I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing. I told him the whole tale of it, each jealousy and folly and all the lives that had been lost because of me. “Her name,” he said. “Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.” “Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?” It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.” “It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said. “Yes.” His voice was sharp. “It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.” He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said. “If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.” “Yet at least what you loved, you fought for.” “That is not always a blessing. I must tell you, all my past is like today, monsters and horrors no one wants to hear.” He held my gaze. Something about him then reminded me strangely of Trygon. An unearthly, quiet patience. “I want to hear,” he said.

The effect of this was to make me abjure hackneyed expressions from an early age, so I suppose I benefited from my mother’s phrasal insouciance in the long run, although it’s possible that my automatic eschewal of clichés occasionally drove me from the Scylla of ridicule into the turbid Charybdisian eddies of sesquipedalian obfuscation...though I trust not.

I might have told him, in those hours, stories of my own. Scylla and Glaucos, Aeëtes, the Minotaur. The stone wall cutting into my back. The floor of my hall wet with blood, reflecting the moon. The bodies I had dragged one by one down the hill, and burned with their ship. The sound flesh makes when it tears and re-forms and how, when you change a man, you may stop the transformation partway through, and then that monstrous, half-beast thing will die. His face would be intent as he listened, his relentless mind examining, weighing and cataloguing. However I pretended I could conceal my thoughts as well as he, I knew it was not true. He would see down to my bones. He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles’ and Ajax’s. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives.

But when I thought of Scylla, I thought of the foolish and all-too-human girl, gasping for breath amid the froth of waves churning in the wake of my father’s boat. I saw her weighed down in the tumultuous water not just by the iron chains in which my father had bound her but also by the terrible truth that she had sacrificed everything she knew for a love as ephemeral and transient as the rainbows that glimmered through the sea spray.

To avoid the Scylla of paleotechnic peace and the Charybdis of War, the leaders of the coming polity will steer a bold course for Eutopia [sic]. They will aim at the development of every region, its folk, work and place, in terms of the genius loci, of every nation, according to the best of its tradition and spirit; but in such wise that each region, each nation, makes its unique contribution to the rich pattern of our ever-evolving Western civilisation.

There is great danger in this Golden Mean, one of whose main objects is to steer clear of shipwreck, Scylla being as fatal as Charybdis. No, this lofty and equable attitude is worse than wrong unless it derives from striking the balance between two very distant opposites. One of the worst perils of the present time is that, in the reaction against ignorant bigotry, people no longer dare to make up their minds about anything. The very practice, which the A∴A∴ so strongly and persistently advocates, tends to make people feel that any positive attitude or gesture is certainly wrong, whatever may be right. They forget that the opposite may, within the limit of the universe of discourse, amount to nothing. [....] Of course, in no case does the Golden Mean advise hesitating, trimming, hedging, compromising; the very object of ensuring an exact balance in your weapon is that its blow may be clean and certain.

Sometimes what we seek to gain through "winning" a conflict is not worth what we're refusing to sacrifice. And true compromise often involves sacrifice: As on the path between Scylla and Charybdis, the monsters of Greek mythology who lie on either side of a narrow strait to devour sailors and ships, either way you go there will be losses. Through life experience we gradually learn to differentiate between the ideals, values and principles which can, and those which cannot, be compromised.

Fafhrd and the Mouser thought of Karnak and its obelisks, of the Pharos lighthouse, of the Acropolis, of the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, of the ruins of Khatti, of the Lost City of Ahriman, of those doomful mirage-towers that seamen see where are Scylla and Charybdis. Of a truth, the architecture of the strange structure varied so swiftly and to such unearthly extremes that it was lifted into an insane stylistic realm all its own. Mist-magnified, its twisted ramps and pinnacles, like a fluid face in a nightmare, pushed upward toward where the stars should have been.

In the middle of a storm, only split-second, highly accurate reactions to circumstances will preserve the plane’s safe course; in clear air, there is a wider margin for error. The smaller the margin for error, the less freedom of choice the pilot has, the more constrained and limited he will be in pursuing his course to his destination. Recognizing this, the pilot not only strives to control the plane at all times; he also engages in meta-level control planning and activity—taking steps to improve his position for controlling the plane by avoiding circumstances where, he can foresee, he will be forced (given his goals) to thread the needle between some Scylla and Charybdis.

Inside it Scylla sits and yelps with a voice that you might take to be that of a young hound, but in truth she is a dreadful monster and no one—not even a god—could face her without being terror-struck. She has twelve mis-shapen feet, and six necks of the most prodigious length; and at the end of each neck she has a frightful head with three rows of teeth in each, all set very close together, so that they would crunch any one to death in a moment, and she sits deep within her shady cell thrusting out her heads and peering all round the rock, fishing for dolphins or dogfish or any larger monster that she can catch, of the thousands with which Amphitrite teems. No ship ever yet got past her without losing some men, for she shoots out all her heads at once, and carries off a man in each mouth.

Then we entered the Straits in great fear of mind, for on the one hand was Scylla, and on the other dread Charybdis kept sucking up the salt water. As she vomited it up, it was like the water in a cauldron when it is boiling over upon a great fire, and the spray reached the top of the rocks on either side. When she began to suck again, we could see the water all inside whirling round and round, and it made a deafening sound as it broke against the rocks. We could see the bottom of the whirlpool all black with sand and mud, and the men were at their wits ends for fear. While we were taken up with this, and were expecting each moment to be our last, Scylla pounced down suddenly upon us and snatched up my six best men. I was looking at once after both ship and men, and in a moment I saw their hands and feet ever so high above me, struggling in the air as Scylla was carrying them off, and I heard them call out my name in one last despairing cry. As a fisherman, seated, spear in hand, upon some jutting rock throws bait into the water to deceive the poor little fishes, and spears them with the ox’s horn with which his spear is shod, throwing them gasping on to the land as he catches them one by one—even so did Scylla land these panting creatures on her rock and munch them up at the mouth of her den, while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony. This was the most sickening sight that I saw throughout all my voyages.

Memories remains about you always within my heart

What it is been hidden from the eyes, This feelings are affected too

throughout my life I’ve steered an uneasy course between the Scylla of solitude and the Charybdis of politics, between my desire to help change the world and my impulse to escape it. The vessel in which I navigate these turbulent waters is music.

Rich men who went in search of more riches while the peasants starved at their feet. Amorous men in search of lovers while their wives wasted away at home. Sons in search of glory while the fields fell into disrepair.

His soft spoken words and shy smiles had burrowed under my skin and taken root there; the absence of them was like a phantom limb, an ailment I could almost feel, almost touch, but was always out of reach.

You see, you are the place where I stow my softness now. You are the place I can hide away, where I can be Scylla, the nymph, Scylla, the gentle monster,

would live as the guardian of her softness, the keeper of her peace, and that was purpose enough for my life.

seeking the flame like a moth that wished to bathe in the light but not be burned.

She had teased me, not cruelly, not like my tormentors, but like a lover. Her power slipped from something menacing to something heady, leading me under her seductive spell until I was clay for her to mold.

of Scylla. He relished the opportunity to recount the chilling

impressions barrage, Lee could no longer grasp the meaning of Vivian's voice as it went on and on explaining things like "crystal cells," "selenoid cells," "grey matter pyramidal cells," powered somehow by atomic fission, "nerve loops" and "synthesis gates" which were not to be confused with "analysis gates" while they looked exactly the same…. Apart from this at least one half of his mental and physical energy had to be expanded in suppressing nausea and bracing himself against the gyrations which still jerked his feet from under him and made friction disks of his shoulders as his body swayed from side to side. All of a sudden he felt that he was being derailed. There was an opening in the plastics wall of the cylinder; a curved metal shield like the blade of a bulldozer jumped into his path, caught him, slowed down his momentum and delivered him safely at a door marked "Apperception-Center 24." It opened and within its frame there stood an angel neatly dressed in the uniform of a registered nurse. "There," said the angel, "at last. How did you like your little Odyssey through The Brain, Dr. Lee?" Lee pushed a hand through the mane of his hair; it felt moist and much tangled up. "Thanks," he said. "It was quite an experience. I enjoyed it; Ulysses, too, probably enjoyed his trip between Scylla and Charybdis—after it was over! It's Miss Leahy, I presume." The reception room where he

alternating “between my personal Scylla of bright expectation and Charybdis of black despair.” He

The aim of this chapter has been to recognize, within a Christian framework, certain truths in postmodernity, without getting snookered by the entire package. The Scylla of modernity and the Charybdis of postmodernity are equally uninviting to those who want to follow another Way, who are convinced that in a universe made by and for a personal/transcendent and omniscient God who talks, the only reasonable stance is that of the apostle Paul: “Let God be true, and every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4).

ridge riding, to use Alvin Gouldner’s term—between the Scylla of positivism and the Charybdis of conventionalist constructivism.

between Scylla and Charybdis,

He turned his steel eyes at me. They hurt me, paralysed me, like the advancing lights of a car. I saw that his body was taut, all of it: also made of steel; that it only worked because it was at an intolerable tension, and that it was our sensation of that tension which had exhausted us, which could no longer be borne. He was the wrong spring which had been put into our machine, that had made Claude ill, George foolish, Boris an anxiety.

Nothing yet,” she said. “But it’s about to. Because we’re about to pass between Scylla and Charybdis.

They’re probably pigs hanging out on Circe’s beach,” Sage said, sounding as enraged as I felt. “Or rotting away in Scylla’s or Charybdis’s stomach,” Thomas added. “Although technically, they’d all be in Charybdis’s stomach now.” King Devin tilted his head curiously. “What do you mean by that?” he asked. “Oh, it’s nothing,” I said. “We just got Charybdis to eat Scylla. That’s all.” King Devin’s eyes widened in what appeared to be genuine shock. “How the hell did you manage that?

They made me a creature of legend, and I would be legendary. They turned my life into a nightmare, so I would become the monster that haunted their dreams. They stole my modest life of peace, so I would give them an impressive, unspeakable legacy built on a throne of their bones. Their cries would echo off the cliffs, falling unheard to the fates just like my own. “By the gods,” they would cry. No. Not by the gods. Damn the gods. By Scylla.

The rules are all over the place because the essence of being mortal is navigating the Charybdis that is chaos, and the Scylla that is order. Humans have a unique ability to live in both.

Il nous faudra donc naviguer entre les Scylla des coûts de la globalisation et Charybde des menaces poutinistes. [Va trebui să navigăm așadar între Scylla costurilor globalismului și Charibda amenințărilor putiniste.] p. 148

Ia adalah seorang pemburu yang tidak ingin bersembunyi di balik kecurigaan orang lain. Akan tetapi, ia tak ingin dihakimi oleh apa yang orang tidak pahami tentang dirinya. Ketika nilai dan moral bertumpang tindih dengan akal sehat dan naluri kejantanan seorang laki laki. Bagaimana ia bisa menghindar dari rayuan Calypso? Godaan hasrat adalah sulur sulur pikiran yang merambat di dinding yang retak. Dari lobang di tembok itulah ia terlahir sebagai telur. Embrio pusat pembuktian ontologis manusia. Kerasnya kehidupan yang kemudian memaksa dirinya harus berjuang. Bersusah payah tumbuh dalam sebuah kontradiksi. Berusaha eksis sebagai pemangsa. Predator yang merangkak di tanah mengincar sasaran. Melihat dirinya sendiri sebagai seekor Scylla yang siap menerkam. Ia adalah seorang pemburu dengan tatapan mematikan dan siap menguji keberanian. Mengintai mangsa, mengarahkan senapan berlaras dua simbol dari identitas dan idealitas yang bisa meledak sewaktu waktu. Namun kebimbangan memaksa ia berlari di antara pohon pohon yang menyembunyikan bayang bayangnya dari kejaran rasa jeri dan kecemasannya sendiri. Hantu moralitas dan norma yang masih ingin ia perdebatkan keberadaannya. Karena baginya, manusia bisa bertindak lebih keji dari seekor ular. Makhluk menjijikkan dengan mulut yang mampu menelan apa saja dan lidah tak bertulang yang sanggup menyemburkan racun berbisa mematikan. Baginya, hasrat adalah benih yang mesti ditanam agar ia tumbuh. Akan tetapi ia adalah biji buah diospyros. Buah para dewa yang memabukkan dan tak bisa  disingkirkan dari perdu yang telanjur menyemak dalam benaknya. Ada masa di mana hidup harus merasai kesenangan dan kedamaian lebih dari permainan hidup dan mati. Lebih dari sekedar petualangan demi menemukan makna kebenaran sejati. Kemenangan sudah menjadi obsesi yang menguasai pikiran semua orang, sebagaimana dulu sebuah kuda kayu raksasa menaklukkan kota Troya. Begitulah, ia adalah titisan Odisseus yang malang, yang dikutuk karena tak mengindahkan keberadaan para dewa. Bagaimana ia menerima dirinya sendiri sebagai seekor kuda liar yang tak ingin dikendalikan oleh siapa pun. Tetapi nafsu adalah juga ibarat ular berbisa yang bisa mematuk ekornya sendiri. Dan ia tahu, senapan bukan cuma senjata yang bisa mematikan seekor buruan. Di tangan seorang pemburu ia bisa membunuh monster bermata satu.  Hutan itu adalah tempat perlindungan para peri. Hasrat purba yang tak terjamah oleh topeng kemunafikan. Ia rumit seperti labirin dan ia tak mewakili keindahan taman taman surgawi. Ia keramat. Sanctuary yang memiliki pesonanya sendiri yang tak terjabarkan dalam ungkapan yang sederhana. Sebuah godaan kecil, nyanyian Sirens yang mematikan. Ia tak ingin tersesat di dalam rimba yang gelap gulita itu. Tapi ada rasa lapar dan haus yang tak mampu ia tolak. Rasa pahit yang pekat berasa mencekik lehernya. Seperti ramuan Circe yang mengubah orang menjadi babi. Ia telah meninggalkan rumahnya di Itacha demi menaklukkan hasrat di dalam dirinya sendiri. Dan demi kerinduan abadi atas kesadaran diri sebagai manusia leta, ia rela dikutuk. Pergi jauh mengembara dan siap mati demi nilai yang ia perjuangkan.

But once you’re aware of the political power model of history, the next goal is to guard against both the Scylla and the Charybdis, against being too credulous and too cynical. Because just as the atrocity story is a tool for political power, unfortunately so too is genocide denial — as we can see from The New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning coverup of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine

If you're only being kind when you find it convenient, that isn't consideration or compassion for others. There are people who need that compassion, even when you don't find it convenient.

The future can be altered by a single deed, Scylla. One choice can change everything.

Avoiding the Scylla of the nunnery, Hermia sails dangerously close to the Charybdis of Titania's lust for the ass-headed Bottom, but emerges safely, and somewhat more self-knowledgeably, into the orderly harbor of marriage.

Moreover, it must be understood that poetry does not bear witness to the real world. Poetry must not be treated like that. Nec tamen ut testes mos est audire poetas... If what poetry says were taken literally, as a testimony to the world, then there would be Cerberus with three heads and a fur of snakes, Perseus would have winged legs, and Scylla would have dogs in her crotch, and poetry would be responsible for any and all atrocities and immoral acts. This is downright nonsensical. Poetic imagination knows no bounds, its creations are free and cannot be placed in any reality, and poets are not to be judged by their historical truthfulness.

between Scylla and Charybdis = to be forced between 2 similar dangerous situations = entre la peste et le choléra

Erasmus characterized his own position in these words: "The wise navigator will steer between Scylla and Charybdis. I have sought to be a spectator of this tragedy." Such a role was not permitted to him, and between the confessional millstones his type was crushed. Where again does one find precisely his blend of the cultivated Catholic scholar: tolerant, liberal, dedicated to the revival of the classical Christian heritage in the unity of Christendom? The leadership of Protestantism was to pass to the Neo-Scholastics and of the Catholics to the Jesuits.

For all those times you stood by us Through thick and thin, fast and furious In-between Scylla and Charybdis Midst tempests and temptations Laudable wonders and lamentable woes, Seasons of silence, moments of madness… Thank You.

There is danger ahead as well as glory; for revival sometimes breeds fanaticism, sometimes goes to the extreme, so that often it is not even in the power of those who start the revival to control it when it has gone beyond a certain length. It is better, therefore, to be forewarned. We have to find our way between the Scylla of old superstitious orthodoxy and the Charybdis of materialism—of Europeanism, of soullessness, of the so-called reform—which has penetrated to the foundation of Western progress.

As the modern scholar Alan Cameron has put it: ‘In 529 the philosophers of Athens were threatened with the destruction of their entire way of life.’ The Christians were behind this – yet you will search almost in vain for the word ‘Christian’ in most of the writings of the philosophers. That is not to say that evidence of them is not there. It is. The miasmatic presence of the religion is keenly felt on countless pages: it is Christians who are driving persecutions, torturing their colleagues, pushing philosophers into exile. Damascius and his fellow scholars loathed the religion and its uncompromising leaders. Even Damascius’s famously mild and gentle teacher, Isidore, ‘found them absolutely repulsive’; he considered them ‘irreparably polluted, and nothing whatever could constrain him to accept their company’. But the actual word Christian is missing. As if the very syllables were too distasteful for them to pronounce, the philosophers resorted to elaborate circumlocutions. At times, the names they gave them were muted. With a masterful understatement, the present system of Christian rule, with its torture, murder and persecution, was referred to as ‘the present situation’ or ‘the prevailing circumstances’. At another time the Christians became – perhaps a reference to those stolen and desecrated statues – ‘the people who move the immovable’. At other times the names were blunter: the Christians were ‘the vultures’ or, more simply still, ‘the tyrant’. Other phrases carried a contemptuous intellectual sneer. Greek literature is awash with hideously rebarbative creatures, and the philosophers turned to these to convey the horror of their situation: the Christians started to be referred to as ‘the Giants’ and the ‘Cyclops’. These particular names seem, at first sight, an odd choice. These are not the most repellent monsters in the Greek canon; Homer alone could have offered the man-eating monster Scylla as a more obvious insult. That would have missed the point. The Giants and the Cyclops of Greek myth aren’t terrible because they are not like men – they are terrible because they are. They belong to the uncanny valley of Greek monsters: they look, at first glance, like civilized humans yet they lack all the attributes of civilization. They are boorish, base, ill-educated, thuggish. They are almost men, but not quite – and all the more hideous for that. It was, for these philosophers, the perfect analogy. When that philosopher had been beaten till the blood ran down his back, the precise insult that he hurled at the judge had been: ‘There, Cyclops. Drink the wine, now that you have devoured the human flesh.

Ambivalence exists in all human relationships, including parent-child. Anna Freud maintained that a mother could never satisfy her infant's needs because those are infinite, but that eventually child and mother outgrow that dependence...In Torn in Tow, the British psycho analyst Rozsika Parker complains that in our open, modern society, the extent of maternal ambivalence is a dark secret. Most mothers treat their occasional wish to be rid of their children as if it were the equivalent of murder itself. Parker proposes that mothering requires two impulses - the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away. To be a successful mother you must nurture and love your child, but cannot smother and cling to your child. Mothering involves sailing between what Parker calls 'the Scylla of intrusiveness and the Charybdis of neglect.' She proposes that the sentimental idea of perfect synchrony between mother and child 'can cast a sort of sadness over motherhood - a constant state of mild regret that a delightful oneness seems always out of reach.' Perfection is a horizon virtue, and our very approach to it reveals its immutable distance. The dark portion of maternal ambivalence toward typical children is posited as crucial to the child's individuation. But severely disabled children who will never become independent will not benefit from their parents' negative feelings, and so their situation demands an impossible state of emotional purity. Asking the parents of severely disabled children to feel less negative emotion than parents of healthy children is ludicrous. My experience of these parents was that they all felt both love and despair. You cannot decide whether to be ambivalent/ All you can decide is what to do with your ambivalence. Most of these parents have chosen to act on one side of the ambivalence they feel, and Julia Hollander chose to act on another side, but I am not persuaded that the ambivalence itself was so different from one of these families to the next. I am enough of a creature of my times to admire most the parents who kept their children and made brave sacrifices for them. I nonetheless esteem Julia Hollander for being honest with herself, and for making what all those other families did look like a choice.

We will need to become more aware of and take precautions against the incredible pull of the Scylla and Charybdis of past and future, and the dreamworld they offer us in place of our lives.

Scylla and Charybdis. From misremembering the Mythology lessons at St Peter’s School – unless it was at Copenhagen Street – I believed for a long time that these names referred to innocent rocky islets at the entrance to the Straits of Messina in Sicily. Two columns forming Italy’s southern gate, in this Mare Nostrum glorified by il Duce. And I thought that if pillars like these existed in London they would be, on the one hand, Clerkenwell, the Little Italy where we lay rotting, and then Soho, the capital’s other Italian neighbourhood, at once sulphurous and more dazzling.

Between the Scylla of the military dictatorship and the Charybdis of the American financial dictatorship there is only one narrow way that leads to a better future. This way is called Pan-Europa

Scylla!

Between Scylla and Charybdis,