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CHAPTER ONE
Charlotte
There was no better place than the library late at night when the world outside is dark and the warm glow of the lights are on. When the crush of people are long gone, leaving only the ones who truly appreciate the magic of it all lost among the stacks.
I swear half of the reason I became a professor was because the campus libraries are open all night long, and no one could tear me away from all those books, all that knowledge, all the adventure and fun.
I mean, sure, I liked teaching. I liked my work. I liked my income and my stellar health plan.
But I was pretty sure it all boiled down to the library.
Which, incidentally, was where fellow faculty members and my students could find me most of the time, despite having a nice office all my own. The problem with my office was there was only maybe room for twenty or thirty books. Forty if I got rid of my printer.
Not enough.
Not nearly enough.
Especially compared to the unused corner of the library where I had three tables pushed together, stacked with a good fifty books, ones I kept flipping between as I was trying to find a new, engaging way to teach Greek history and philosophy in a way that didn’t put the entire class to sleep.
For me, history had always been exciting, full of larger-than-life characters, wars started over the love of women or small men’s prides, the wonder of new inventions, and the struggle for each civilization to explain life itself.
The ultimate questions:Why are we here?AndWhere did we come from?And all the interesting answers each society through from each age would come up with.
The Kuba people—from a former kingdom in Central Africa—they had Mbombo who vomited out the world after a stomachache.
In Egypt, you had Atum whose semen created the world.
Or, my personal favorite mythology, we had Greece.
At first, it was all Chaos, a massive emptiness. But somewhere along the way, the other primordial gods appeared. Gaea, Eros, and Tartarus. Somehow, Chaos and Gaea—both females—were able to procreate, creating Erebus and Nyx.
Then through many a wild, windy, twisty story, we transitioned from the Titans to the Olympians. Where we met Daddy Zeus and all of his screwed-up-edness.
I think it was the depth of the Greek myths that truly fascinated me. Who screwed who, who screwedoverwho. All of those tales, all of the thought that had gone into the creation of these tales.
I was just as fascinated by the unknown people who first wove the tales as the tales themselves.
What kind of personal famine must a person have felt to create the story of Erysichthon, who got so hungry that he… atehimselfto death?
How warped was the brain of the person who came up with the story of Leda… who mated with aswan?
How bad was the heartache of a man to come up with the story of Pan, who made his flute out of a woman who rejected him?
Don’t even get me started on Ixion mating with a cloud to create centaurs.
I mean… you couldn’t help but let your mind wander when you heard these fantastical tales.
Or, at least, I couldn’t.
My students?
Yeah, they were a harder sell.
Hence my never-ending pursuit to get them as fascinated by the tales as I had been since I was a little girl.
If only I was as engaging a teacher as my father had been for me, sitting beside me in bed at night and telling me the tales of the classics instead of reading me bedtime stories.
I mean, objectively, was it completely inappropriate? Absolutely. The Greek myths were filled with sex and violence and really, really false education.
