narcissist

Narcissus was beautiful the way a blade or a sunset is beautiful, and he knew it. The son of the river-god Cephisus and the nymph Liriope, he had grown from an uncanny child into a youth no one could look at without wanting, and he took the wanting as his due. Admirers were scenery to him. Their longing left him cold, and their humiliation, when he turned away, cost him nothing at all.

Echo was one of them. A nymph already punished into near-silence, able only to repeat the last words spoken to her, she trailed him through the woods hoarding his scraps of speech, and when at last she showed herself and reached for him he recoiled in disgust. She wasted away from the shame of it until only her voice was left, the helpless answer that still comes back to us from empty hillsides. She was not the last heart he broke, and eventually one of the wounded asked the gods for justice.

Nemesis, whose whole office is the correcting of exactly this kind of pride, took the case. The sentence was elegant and needed no thunderbolt: let Narcissus love, once, and love something he can never have or hold. To carry it out she required only a still pool deep in the woods, unbroken and clear, and a hot afternoon that led him there to drink.

He leaned over the water and a face rose to meet his, and he wanted it before he had any idea what he was looking at. That was the trap. He never fully understood that the beloved was himself. He reached in and it broke apart; he waited and it gathered itself again; he spoke and watched its lips move in the same unbearable silence. Every hunger he had ever roused in other people he now felt in full, fixed on a thing that could not answer and would not leave.

And he could not leave it either. Thirst, hunger, the cooling of the day, none of it weighed anything against the pull of that reflection, and he stayed at the edge of the pool until he simply wore away. What was found on the bank was not a body but a flower, pale petals bent around a gold centre, leaning out over the water in the attitude he had died in. It still bears his name.

A narcissist is his descendant: a person whose attention curves so far inward that everyone else becomes, at best, a mirror, prized while the reflection flatters and dropped the moment it stops. What undid Narcissus was never the beauty. It was that he could not look up from it.