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Book: Weight Read Free
Author: Jeanette Winterson
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left were banished to Britain, where the cold inhospitable rocks are worse than death. I was spared for my great strength.
    In a way I was allowed to be my own punishment.
       
    Because I loved the earth. Because the seas of the earth held no fear for me. Because I had learned the positions of the planets and the track of the stars. Because I am strong, my punishment was to support the Kosmos on my shoulders. I took up the burdenof the whole world, the heavens above it, and the depths below. All that there is, is mine, but none of it in my control. This is my monstrous burden. The boundary of what I am.
    And my desire?
    Infinite space.
       
    It was the day of my punishment.
    The gods assembled. The women were on the left and the men were on the right. There’s Artemis, worked muscle and tied-back hair, fiddling with her bow so that she doesn’t have to look at me. We were friends. We hunted together.
    There’s Hera, sardonic, aloof. She couldn’t care less. As long as it’s not her.
    There’s Hermes, fidgety and pale, he hates trouble. Next to him lounges Hephastus, ill-tempered and lame, Hera’s crippled son, tolerated for his gold smithy. Opposite him is Aphrodite his wife, who loathes his body. We’ve all had her, though we treather like a virgin. She smiled at me. She was the only one who dared …
    Zeus read out his decree. Atlas, Atlas, Atlas . It’s in my name, I should have known. My name is Atlas – it means ‘the long suffering one’.
       
    I bent my back and braced my right leg, kneeling with my left. I bowed my head and held my hands, palms up, almost like surrender. I suppose it was surrender. Who is strong enough to escape their fate? Who can avoid what they must become?
    The word given, teams of horses and oxen began to strain forward, dragging the Kosmos behind them like a disc-plough. As the great ball ploughed infinity, pieces of time were dislodged. Some fell to earth, giving the gift of prophecy and second sight. Some were thrown out into the heavens, making black holes where past and future cannot be distinguished. Time spattered my calf muscles and the sinews in my thighs. I felt the world before it began,and the future marked me. I would always be here.
    As the Kosmos came nearer, the heat of it scorched my back. I felt the world settle against the sole of my foot.
    Then, without any sound, the heavens and the earth were rolled up over my body and I supported them on my shoulders.
    I could hardly breathe. I could not raise my head. I tried to shift slightly or to speak. I was dumb and still as a mountain. Mount Atlas they soon called me, not for my strength but for my silence.
    There was a terrible pain in the seventh vertebra of my neck. The soft tissue of my body was already hardening. The hideous vision of my life was robbing me of life. Time was my Medusa. Time was turning me to stone.
       
    I do not know how long I crouched like this, petrified and motionless.
    * * *
    At last I began to hear something.
    I found that where the world was close to my ears, I could hear everything. I could hear conversation, parrots squawking, donkeys braying. I heard the rushing of underground rivers and the crackle of fires lighted. Each sound became a meaning, and soon I began to de-code the world.
    Listen, here is a village with a hundred people in it, and at dawn they take their cattle to the pastures and at evening they herd them home. A girl with a limp takes the pails over her shoulders. I know she limps by the irregular clank of the buckets. There’s a boy shooting arrows – thwack! thwack! into the padded hide of the target. His father pulls the stopper out of a wine jar.
    Listen, there’s an elephant chased by a band of men. Over there, a nymph is becoming a tree. Her sighs turn into sap.
    Someone is scrambling up a scree slope. His boots loosen the ground under him. His nails are torn. Hefalls exhausted on some goat-grass. He breathes heavily and goes to sleep.
    I can hear the

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