What this project is about.
This one is from Book 8.
How long it took to read this (aloud): 10 mins 44s
What it’s “about”: Some idiot cuts down a sacred tree (and someone trying to defend it). Ceres sends a minion to give Famine some orders. Famine shags the tree cutter and infects him with … hunger. He spends all he has and then ends up pimping out his shape shifting daughter, but eventually even that doesn’t work and he eats himself to death. The end. Don’t, boys and girls, cut down trees.
Words I didn’t know: xx
Quotable quotes:
At sight of blood the crowd stepped back in honor,
Except one who had less fear than the rest
And leaped in Erysichthon’s way to stop
The blasphemous swinging of the axe; he halted.
His master faced him, roaring, “Here’s reward
For your fine manners and your piety!”
And at one blow sheared off his victim’s head.
AND
“Though two opposing forces shape the powers
Possessed by Famine and enjoyed by Ceres,
Famine set out to do as she was told
And sailed the winds toward Erysichthon’s palace.
Then where the irreligious king lay sleeping
(The time was night) she climbed into his bed
And mounted him to give him all she had,
Kissing his throat, his empty heart, and dreaming lips,
And breathing through his pores she planted hunger,
The kind of hunger that is never stilled.
Knowing her orders had been well accomplished,
She left the world where Ceres poured her riches
For house and desert where she felt at home.
AND
hen when he waked he felt a wild desire
To eat as he had never done before.
With shrinking stomach and with jaws on fire
He roared for all that earth, air, sea could give
To set before him at one meal, yet as he
Pursued his way through half a dozen courses,
He spoke of hunger gnawing through his sides,
And midway through one feast called for another.
What would have fed a city or a nation
Was not enough for him who ate alone:
The more he ate the more he craved to eat.
As ocean swallows rivers of the earth
Nor overflows with waters near or far,
And as a raging fire eats up fuel
In countless logs or anything that burns
And both take more as more falls into them,
Hunger increased by all they’ve had before,
So blasphemous and greedy Erysichthon
Took down each meal and filled another plate.
To him all food became just cause for hunger;
Great eating led to greater emptiness.
AND
At last when Famine
Exhausted even the girl’s resourcefulness,
And food increased his ravenous disease,
The old king’s teeth tore at his wasted body
And in despair he ate himself to death.
How it lands to my eco-sensibility: Oh my – you kill something beautiful (even after you were warned) and you WILL be punished….
Obvious allusions, ways it was used (that I am aware of already) : xx
What I know I didn’t ‘get’: xx
To my knowledge, who’s used it why/how (RACC): Presumably Stephen King in that short story in Skeleton crew, about the doctor washed up on the desert island with a suitcase of cocaine and his surgical kit…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Type
Further research questions: xx
Anything else: xx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erysichthon_of_Thessaly
marchudson.net 
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