41. The rejection, part 3.

He remembered his time in a famous city at the height of its decadence. This must surely have to do with the souls he saw around him in this city, which would be remembered in similar ways once its own time was over: a capital of excess, an empire of waste, where overindulgence was both the key to success and a normal practice of the elite.

There he had been a plain young woman, but a woman of position, and so forced into the revelries of the nobility. In that place, at that time, they had understood how the body itself would impose limits upon pleasure, but these people had found ways to trick and cheat it. When the flesh revolted against too much food and drink, they purged it of its contents, and returned to the task. When the skin became chapped and raw from rutting, slaves applied a balm made out of walnut oil, and soon the orgies resumed.

Feasts were to last days; to do anything less would be an affront to the gods that were thought to view the city with a particular favor, or a dishonor to whatever mortal person they were celebrating--who was most likely snoring peacefully in a corner. Because those gods too were believed to feast and tryst, and what better worship, what better obeisance, than to imitate them?

It was at one such party that the woman felt (feeling as he had, in life after life) outside of the place and time, and wondered, after the third time a slave discreetly passed by her couch with a gilded bowl intended for her vomit, whether she was born too soon, or too late, or for that matter why she'd been born at all. Her eyes drifted over the body of a tiger and a peacock, placed ostentatiously where all the guests could see them, showing the wealth of the hosts that they could sacrifice such exotic things in their household shrine.

Getting up a little unsteadily, she said, unheard, "I reject this excess," and left the banquet hall. Who or what were they even commemorating? As her thoughts swam in a haze of wine and the nauseating smell of delicacies brought from around the empire (candied birds' wings, spiny fruits, mounds of sugared squares made of who knew what and garnished with the colorful plumage of Indian birds), she wove quietly through the revelers, and once outside located her bearers. The night was sultry and stank of the garbage that had collected in the gutters throughout the day.

They took her home, where she put on a simple dress and a woolen cloak, collected some books and a lot of writing paper, and had herself carried through the darkness of the remaining night. On the way she sipped from a flask of sweet, diluted wine, which her slaves had chilled with shaved ice. This had been before she gave them all her wealth and left before they could recover their words. She looked out into the quiet, dark streets, forming her plan. Just before sunrise she arrived at a town whose name no one in the senate knew.

From there, the next day, she walked on foot, like a pilgrim, further out into the provinces, where only fanatics went, clutching her books and her paper and her little tubes of ink to her like children.

She lived out the rest of her days in the happiest solitude, writing book after book on every subject she knew. This would have been called the first true encyclopedia--the first in the Roman world at any rate--but no one ever read it or knew it existed. A migrant family had found her hovel after she died, happy, in her sleep, and used her books (the ones she'd brought and the ones she'd written) for kindling, after burying her stiff body in the woods.