Orpheus and Eurydice: Why We Test What We’re Afraid to Lose

When Eurydice is summoned from among the dead, she comes slowly. The wound that killed her still hinders her step. Orpheus’s song has brought punishments to a halt: Ixion’s wheel is motionless, Sisyphus sits on his stone, and the rulers of the underworld have consented to an exception. He has persuaded death to release his wife. Now he must wait for her to walk.

The person we have longed for may return with difficulties of their own, while our longing has had time to imagine a reunion in which every difficulty disappears. Eurydice has been granted another life, and her first movement toward it is a wounded one.

In Ovid’s account, her release comes with a condition: Orpheus must lead her out without looking back until he has left the valley below. She will follow him through the darkness. He can have the woman he loves, provided he postpones the sight of her. After everything his love has accomplished, the remaining distance must be crossed before he can see whether it has succeeded.

The Years He Asks to Borrow

Their marriage has scarcely begun. The wedding torch sputters into smoke; soon afterward, a snake bites Eurydice’s ankle as she walks with the Naiads. Orpheus descends among the dead carrying the grief of a husband who has already become a widower, although the life those two words were supposed to contain has hardly had time to happen.

His appeal is surprisingly measured. He acknowledges the power of the rulers below and the mortality of everyone above. Eurydice will belong to them eventually, when she has lived her proper span. He asks for the use of the years taken from her. Even in his grief, he can imagine returning what he begs to receive; he wants the ordinary life in which losing her would have been preceded by living with her.

We sometimes keep such an unlived life going long after its possibility has ended. A remembered sentence invites a new answer, the new answer changes the conversation, and soon the person who left is speaking to us with a willingness they may never have shown while they were there. In these encounters, a silence can be filled, a departure delayed. We have enough of the other person within us to renew the meeting, and enough of ourselves to make it end differently.

Orpheus’s appeal carries this wish beyond remembrance. Those condemned to repeat their suffering pause to listen to his, and Eurydice herself is called. Her slow approach gives the recovery a difficulty which an imagined reunion can omit: she has her own distance to cross. The wound belongs to her body, however urgently he needs to be relieved of what happened to it.

Affection after loss can have this unevenness. A tender gesture reaches us, and almost at once we begin considering how much it would hurt to lose it. The person offering it may still be trying to come closer while we have already followed them into a future departure. Having wanted their return, we find ourselves preparing for their absence in the first moments of their company.

What We Ask the Silence to Say

The ascent is steep, dark, and silent. Orpheus has a promise to rely on, but the darkness withholds the sight that would make the promise feel fulfilled. Ovid leaves the reason for the gods’ prohibition unstated. We can follow its effect closely enough without pretending to know why they imposed it: Eurydice’s presence and his assurance of her presence have been separated.

A woman who was alive beside him has already been taken away, and her return cannot erase his knowledge of how suddenly he lost her. The promise gives him a reason to continue which his fear need not find comforting. Nothing in the condition requires a peaceful ascent: Eurydice can be following while he is afraid that she is not.

Reading, we occupy a position he would dearly like to reach. We have seen her summoned, have been told how she walks, and know that she accompanies him. The terrible interval is filled with a presence he cannot see. His impulse to look is understandable precisely because we know how little needs to be discovered and how much the discovery will cost.

A quieter version can occur with someone sitting beside us. Their words are affectionate, but we listen beneath them for whatever would make the affection convincing. A hesitation begins to matter more than the answer; the answer is repeated, and now the repetition sounds less spontaneous. We wanted to hear what they felt. Gradually, they are being asked to produce a feeling in us which will make further listening unnecessary.

Those demands can separate even when an answer is accurate. In a laboratory study of repeated checking, participants became more accurate on a computer-based memory task, while repeated checking of the relevant material reduced their confidence in the memory, its vividness, and its detail. The result concerns that task; it cannot explain a marriage. It does give us a precise instance of improved accuracy accompanied by diminishing assurance. Another check need not provide more of what made the checking seem necessary.

On the upward path, the reassurance Orpheus wants is within the reach of a small movement. He has persuaded the rulers of the dead to release Eurydice; it must be difficult to accept that his own next movement can undo their decision. The woman is there. The feeling that would let him leave her unseen has not followed the same route.

The Answer We Have Already Given

Suppose a friend has been helping us unpack after a move. There are still boxes everywhere, but we insist that they should go and enjoy their evening. They put on their coat and leave. Their innocent efficiency completes an offense they have not been told they are committing: we wanted them to stay without being asked.

The wish has a tenderness we should hesitate to ridicule. It is pleasant to find that our needs occupy someone else’s thoughts, that care can reach us before we have worked out how to request it. Yet the pleasure we wanted now determines the meaning of the whole encounter. The hours our friend has already given us begin to count for less than the invitation they failed to disregard.

If they notice our disappointment and take off their coat, another doubt becomes available. Perhaps they are staying to avoid a scene. We have obtained their company by making our need perceptible, then discounted the company because our need helped to bring it about. Between going and staying, the friend appears to have exhausted the possible replies without reaching an acceptable one.

The prohibition given to Orpheus is severe, but at least it has been spoken. Our friend learns of the condition through the disappointment produced by breaking it. We have asked for freely offered care while privately deciding which act will count as free, and we retain the right to revise that decision after the act. A direct request would expose us to refusal. This arrangement lets us keep our need partly hidden while requiring the other person to answer for it.

The conversation may have begun well before the coat was put on. We have already heard the refusal, detected the impatience, answered the excuse. Our friend has acquired several voices, all familiar, although none has yet spoken in the room. When the actual answer comes, it has to contend with replies that have been accumulating in their absence. A kind one can be dismissed as politeness; an impatient one has the advantage of agreeing with what we expected.

On the ascent, Orpheus is trying to establish that Eurydice is still behind him. He has devised no secret examination of her love. His turn nevertheless gives these smaller scenes a disturbing consequence to consider. The act by which he seeks to discover whether he has lost her becomes the act through which he does lose her. He will see something real, but what he sees will already have been changed by his looking.

The One Who Dies Again

Ovid names both his fear that Eurydice may be failing and his eagerness to see her. At the instant of the turn, Orpheus is amans, loving. The love that brought him into the underworld has survived the climb. It accompanies the movement that destroys the return.

Orpheus reaches out and catches only air. Eurydice’s farewell barely reaches his ears. Ovid gives her no accusation and asks what she could complain of except being loved—a tenderness which draws our sympathy toward Orpheus just when she is being taken from him. She has made the slow journey with the wound, has been within reach of the life he requested, and must now undergo a second loss because he could not bear the interval before seeing her.

His fear explains the turn. Her second death prevents the explanation from becoming an acquittal. The years he asked to borrow were hers as well, and her part in the story exceeds the comfort her presence might have given him.

A quarrel arranged to find out whether someone cares has this second participant too. For the person being tested, the quarrel is an event in the relationship, with hurt and exhaustion of its own. An impatient response may owe something to the demand that produced it. We can then take that impatience as evidence of what the person secretly felt all along, omitting our own contribution from the account of what we have discovered.

Such a test may do damage without ending a relationship, and an unhappy answer may reveal a problem that was there before the question. Broken promises and repeated harm remain reasons to reconsider trust. Where speaking plainly is safe, a request lets the other person respond to more of what is actually being asked; it cannot make the response kind or the history irrelevant.

“I’d like you to stay” leaves our friend with a choice and leaves us exposed to it. They may be tired. They may be glad that we have finally stopped insisting the boxes are light. Their affection has room to become an action once they know what we need, although we have to give up the particular proof that would have come from their knowing without being told.

If they stay, the relief may still fade. Tomorrow’s uncertainty does not by itself change what they did tonight. We can notice the next condition we are preparing—another refusal of help, another occasion on which they must contradict us to prove that they care—and leave it unspoken. The help already given can remain part of the relationship while we are unsure how secure we feel within it. On the first ascent, that possibility was still open to Orpheus: Eurydice could continue toward the living without first making him unafraid.

When He Can Look Back

After losing her again, Orpheus begs the ferryman for another crossing and is refused. He stays on the bank for seven days before leaving. His grief continues, but the opportunity to bring Eurydice back has ended.

There is a further meeting, however, in the next book of Ovid’s poem. Orpheus is murdered, and his shade descends to the place he had entered while alive. He finds Eurydice among the blessed and embraces her. They walk together, sometimes side by side, sometimes with one ahead of the other. When he leads, he can look back safely.

The change is tender enough to make us linger. Eurydice can walk ahead of him; he can turn toward her; their company no longer depends on preserving the terrible arrangement of the ascent. Ovid allows them an ease withheld from the living pair. A backward glance, which once destroyed their future, can now belong to their life together among the shades.

They have both died. The reunion leaves the years Orpheus asked to borrow unlived. Those years would have contained much that neither could anticipate: disagreements which passed, plans which failed, kindness offered awkwardly or at the wrong moment. Each would have had to meet a person whose wishes could diverge from their own. Even the happiest answer would have come from someone free to give another.

Orpheus had asked for enough time to live with Eurydice before losing her. For part of the ascent, he had been given it, although she was walking slowly and he was afraid. The darkness concealed a woman coming toward the same daylight. His fear, which had remembered her absence so faithfully, left him unable to wait for her arrival.

Sources

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 10–11, translated by Brookes More, 1922; Latin text consulted for Book 10.

Eliane C. P. Dek et al., “Repeated Checking Causes Distrust in Memory but Not in Attention and Perception,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 48, no. 7 (2010): 580–587.