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SHE HAD BEEN READING too long and by a light too dim.
“I may not be here always,”
She always slept before the lesser fire died.
She had married young, had borne her children young, and she had been a good mother. She had seen her children through early babyhood, childhood and adolescence, a son, a daughter, and then into somewhat too early marriages. Now she thought of them as friends, apart from herself, man and woman with their own concerns. Indeed she drew apart from them, needing to discover whether her life had meaning beyond wifehood and motherhood. She had enjoyed both functions in her somewhat reserved fashion, but there was a time for everything, and the time had come for something more.
“And relationships,” he had told her, “contain the essential meaning of life.”
Living alone, laughter was what she missed.
she allowed him to love her,
Yet the original delicacy held. She was still to be sought and not to do the seeking.
Before her widowhood she had been a daughter and sister, wife and mother, dividing herself perforce, though willingly, for she had enjoyed each relationship and treasured her memories. Now she was living with herself and by herself as though she were a stranger, discovering new likes and dislikes, new abilities.
“Do not limit happiness,” he had said gravely. “One takes it where one finds it.”
He was writing a book on immortality,
They were compatible, but she was the knowing one.
They were bantering on the edge of truth again and beyond it they had never ventured.
Pajamas suited her better, he had said, and so she had worn them until he was gone. Then, and who could possibly understand this, the very day after his funeral she had gone to the finest shop in the city, and had bought a dozen nightgowns, wisps of lace and silk and, quite alone, she decked herself nightly for sleep.
She searched her heart, her mind, to discover memories, not so much of guilt as of distaste.
“I make all music my own,”
Yet in the midst of all this to which she was accustomed she was waiting for something more and, moreover, was aware of waiting.
If she could not think of what she wanted, she could begin by rejecting what she did not want.
“it now occurs to me that death has at least one important use. There is no human progress without death. Life is never static and thus inevitably it progresses from youth to old age.
Thus they parted and she was alone again, yet not alone, for she realized in this instant that she might never be alone again unless she could recover from the new presence in her thoughts.
Let her be satisfied in comforting one who needed her rather than dwelling upon her own need!
Let her be honored by love and not roused by it—
“At least death is an interruption,”
the beginning of any reality is contained in an idea.”
Between two towns she found a cliff and upon the cliff an emptiness.
That part of her life, that strange interlude which she could never explain to anyone, and would never, that, too, was over. She sat for minutes in remembering thought. Somehow she felt no bereavement.
“I doubt I’ll ever tell you. There are parts of one’s life that must be closed, absolutely, except as they explain the present.
The exactitude demanded by such scientific pursuits had bred exactitude in her being, expressed in honesty carried sometimes to an extreme.
Perhaps life was merely a series of experiences that could not be explained even to one’s self.
…She woke in the night as usual after five hours of sleep. That was her habit—five hours of deep dreamless sleep and then she woke absolutely, her mind clear and aware. Moonlight streamed through the open window and the air was crisply chill.
She did not know him well enough, and might never know him well enough, for the completeness and the complexity of the true meaning of love, a word she never allowed herself to use as she daily heard it used, carelessly, and in regard to a multiplicity of objects and persons, expressing mere fondness or exaggerated liking.
No, she recognized the longing of last night for what it was, a yearning in her loneliness for a companionship most easily and simply expressed through a shared physical experience. She was grateful that she had forbidden herself. Nothing could be less gratifying to her than such an experience, prematurely expressed, so that afterward their relationship would have come to an abrupt end.
I want to see something that I can see only half blindly, as a musician goes about creating a symphony. He hasn’t any idea of how to do it, but he blunders along, inventing as he goes. That’s me, too. It’s only the artist in a human being that makes him creative. Without it he’s no more than a technician.
She waited, having learned that though he was articulate enough when he spoke of his work, he was not at all articulate about himself, not because he was shy, she perceived, but because he was not accustomed to thinking about himself.
“It didn’t matter how many experiences I had or with whom. They all ended the same way—in a sort of disgust with the woman and with myself. I couldn’t understand why. She—whichever she happened to be—was always irresistibly attractive until I’d slept with her—maybe not at once but inevitably, and then it would be over. I’d stop seeing her then. I suppose I knew subconsciously that there was no real relationship there—a blind demand of the body, meaningless so far as communication went, like eating when you’re hungry. Anyway, slowly, I grew beyond the meaningless stage. I simply stopped. I saw
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so I lay thinking about what you’d said and trying to justify myself in my choice of work by reasoning out the relationship between science and art—which this morning seems to me to be that art concerns itself with beauty and science concerns itself with reality. Perhaps we couldn’t face the harsh reality without seeing the beauty, too. We need both science and art.”
Her answer was literal. She would never try to explain the inexplicable fact of her relationship to him. She owed no one such explanation. She was alone, she was free.
The image of love is so easily warped—misshaped—perverted somehow, so that never again does it appear what it is, the only reason for living, the only refuge, the only source of energy and soul’s growth. The very power of love—the most powerful force in life—makes love produce, when it is warped, or perverted, or even misplaced, the greatest suffering in life.”
Do what she might, how could she hide from him the truth? But why indeed must truth be hidden?
Love made the lover lonely without the beloved, an eternal loneliness which nothing could mend until the beloved was here again.
He was not thinking of her, and she realized it. He was thinking of himself, caught in a web of desire for her, resenting her because he was beginning to know how deeply he loved her. He wanted her physically and was horrified at himself. Yet if she put out her hand, if she touched him, she could have him.
“Love keeps me not only living but alive.”
She had begun it after Arnold’s death, when she was learning the meaning of sorrow, and not only the sorrow of death but the deeper sorrow of knowing that what had been was not all that it could have been had there been more understanding and therefore more communication between Arnold and herself. They had both done the best they could together. If she realized there might have been, a deeper happiness, so had he. Of that she was sure, for she had sometimes felt his gaze upon her and, lifting her head, had seen sadness in his eyes, and silently had respected that sadness, comprehending in her
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It was that moment in summer when growth is ended, and nature contemplates the annual death of winter.
The need for physical love was only a materialization of the spirit's craving for communication. There was no essential difference between flesh and spirit, simply a difference in mode of expression.
She must be quite willing to release him while she loved him—even because she loved him, for love, if it be true, seeks only the fulfillment of the beloved and this on the highest level.
