PARTISAN REVIEW
them, as you make your way inside, and when the reel is exhausted,
tie the end of it to the beginning of the next, so as never to have a break
in the chain. Then on your way back you must re-wind the thread until
you come to the end which Ariadne will have in her hand. I don't know
why I insist so much, when all that part of the enterprise is as easy as
good-morning. The real difficulty is to preserve unbroken, to the last inch
of the thread, the will to come back; for the perfumes will make you
forgetful, as will also your natural curiosity, which will conspire to make
you weaken. I have told you this already, and have nothing to add.
Here are the reels. Goodbye."
I left Daedalus and made off to rejoin Ariadne.
IX
Those reels of thread were the occasion of the first dispute between
Ariadne and myself. She wanted me to hand over to her, for safe
keeping in her corsage, those same reels which Daedalus had entrusted
to me. She claimed that to wind and unwind such things was a woman's
job (one, in fact, in which she was particularly expert) and that she
war-ted to spare me the bother of attending to it. But in reality she
hoped in this way to remain the mistress of my fate, a thing to which
I would not consent at any price. Moreover I had another suspicion.
Ariadne would be reluctant to unwind, where every tum of the reel
allowed me to stray farther from herself: she might hold back the
thread, or pull it towards her; in such a case I should be prevented
from going in as far as I wanted. I therefore stood my ground, in the
face even of that last argument of women, a flood of tears-knowing
well that if one once begins to yield one's little finger, they are quick
to snap up the whole arm, and the rest with it.
The thread in question was neither of linen, nor of wool. Daedalus
had made it from some unknown material, which even my sword, when
I experimented with a little piece, was powerless to cut. I left the sword
in Ariadne's care, being determined (after what Daedalus had said to
me about the superiority which man owes wholly to his instruments,
and the decisive role of these in my victories over the monsters)–
being determined, as I say, to subdue the Minotaur with the strength
of my bare hands. When, after all this we arrived before the entrance
to the labyrinth, a portal embellished with that double axe which one
saw everywhere in Crete, I entreated Ariadne on no account to stir
from the spot. She insisted that she should herself tie the end of the
thread to my wrist, with a knot which she was pleased to call a lover's;
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