Eos

Every morning she opens the gates of heaven. She is Eos — the dawn, the rose-fingered, the first light that precedes the sun, the daughter of Hyperion and Theia and sibling of Helios and Selene. She is the transition: the margin between the dark and the bright that contains what neither full state has. She has been opening the gates since before the current organisation of the divine world, before the Olympians named themselves the Olympians, before the world had its current form. EOS: THE ROSE-FINGERED is the account of the morning goddess told from inside the morning — from inside the renewal that the opening of the gates produces, the honest account of what it is to be the beginning of every day for longer than most things have existed. She loved mortals. The honest account of why: not the condescending love of the divine for what is beneath it, but the morning's love for the morning thing — the mortal who has the urgency of the limited life, who wakes with the full quality of the present, who gives the day the attention the day deserves. She loved them for the morning quality in them. She loved Tithonus most completely. She asked Zeus to make him immortal. She forgot to ask for eternal youth. The forgetting was not carelessness — it was the failure of the person who asked for the essence and missed the necessary condition. He aged. She loved the aging. He became the cicada. She hears him every morning. She watched her son Memnon fight at Troy and watched Achilles kill him. She spread the rose light over the field where he fell. She opened the gates the next morning and every morning after. The morning comes anyway. The gates are open.