Narcissus and Echo

At a Glance

• Central figures: Narcissus, a youth of extraordinary beauty who rejected all who loved him; and Echo, a nymph cursed by Hera to repeat only the last words spoken to her.
• Setting: Ancient Greece - forests, mountains, and a still pool of water; the story belongs to the broader Greek mythological tradition.
• The turn: Narcissus, guided by Nemesis to a clear pool, gazes at his own reflection and falls in love with it, not recognizing it as himself.
• The outcome: Narcissus wastes away by the pool and dies; after his death the gods transform him into the flower that bears his name. Echo, rejected earlier, had already faded to a voice alone.
• The legacy: The narcissus flower, which grows near quiet pools and rivers, is said to be Narcissus himself, still gazing at the water.

Hera came looking for Zeus among the nymphs, as she often did, and found Echo instead - talkative Echo, who held the queen of the gods in conversation long enough for Zeus to slip away. Hera understood the trick. She took from Echo the thing she loved most: her own voice. From that day forward, Echo could only return to others the words they had just given her. She kept the sound of speech without keeping any of its content. Whatever she had once meant to say was gone.

Narcissus was already making enemies before Nemesis took notice of him. He was that rare and dangerous sort of beautiful: cold about it, as if the admiration of others was both his due and his contempt. He moved through the world leaving people diminished. He didn’t notice. Or he noticed and preferred it that way.

Hera’s Curse and the Fading Nymph

Echo had been alone in the forest for some time when she saw Narcissus hunting. Whatever was left of her sense of self dissolved on the spot. She followed him through the trees, keeping back, watching the way he moved through dappled light, and if she had been able to speak first she might have said something that mattered. She could not. She could only wait for him to give her words to work with.

He called out - perhaps to a companion who had drifted off, perhaps to the woods themselves. Is anyone here?

Here, Echo said, from the shadows.

He looked around. Come here.

Come here, she said, and stepped out from the trees, arms open, full of feeling that she could not name aloud.

Narcissus recoiled. Get away from me.

Echo could only give it back: Get away from me.

She retreated into the forest. She did not come out again. The sorrow moved through her slowly, the way cold moves through stone - until there was nothing of her left to be cold. Her body thinned, then faded, then was gone entirely. What remained was the voice, loose in the hills, catching the ends of other people’s sentences and returning them across the valley. It is still there. You can hear it in the right mountains.

Nemesis at the Pool

Narcissus had broken others the way he broke Echo - cleanly, without particular interest in the damage. Nemesis, who keeps accounts, noticed. She does not act quickly, but she acts with precision, and what she arranged for Narcissus was proportionate: she led him, thirsty from the hunt, to a pool so still it served as a mirror.

He knelt at the edge. He looked down.

The face that looked back was the most beautiful he had ever seen. He did not know it was his own face. Why would he? He had never seen it - not like this, close and full and looking directly back at him with an expression that seemed to answer his own longing. He reached for it. The surface broke. The face scattered into rings of water and then slowly, terribly, reassembled itself.

He stayed.

The Boy at the Water

He forgot to eat. He forgot the hunt, the companions he had arrived with, the way back. He lay at the edge of the pool and stared at the water, and when the light changed the face changed with it, and he loved it more for that, the way it moved, the way it held him in its gaze. When he wept, it wept. When he leaned down to press his lips to the surface, the face rose to meet him, and then the water shook and the face was gone and he was alone with his own wet hands.

There were moments - you can imagine them - when something almost broke through. The logic of a reflection is merciless. Every gesture he made, it made. Every longing he felt, it wore on its face. He must have felt, without being able to name it, that the beautiful figure in the water was inextricable from himself, that the love he felt was somehow circular, that it had no exit. But Narcissus had spent his whole life turning away from connection. He could not make himself understand what he was looking at.

What the Gods Left Behind

He wasted away the same way Echo had - slowly, the life going out of him in degrees while he remained fixed in place. She had faded for grief at being refused. He faded for grief at something that could not be refused because it was not there. By the time he died, the pool had his face in it and nothing else.

When those who had loved him came looking, there was no body at the waterside. In its place, a flower - white petals around a yellow center, stem bent as if something in it had always wanted to look down. The narcissus grows near water. It grows in places where the ground is soft and still and the light comes in sideways off a surface. The poets say it leans. It does lean. You can see it in any spring meadow, the head dipped just slightly toward whatever stillness lies below.

Echo was not there to see it. Echo was already the air.