Faithful and Virtuous Night

by Louise Glück

You have no idea how shocking it is to a small child when something continuous stops.

It had occurred to me that all human beings are divided into those who wish to move forward and those who wish to go back. Or you could say, those who wish to keep moving and those who want to be stopped in their tracks as by the blazing sword.

I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem there is no perfect ending. Indeed, there are infinite endings. Or perhaps, once one begins, there are only endings.

Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.

I write about you all the time, I said aloud. Every time I say “I,” it refers to you.

Who would call in the middle of the night? Trouble calls, despair calls. Joy is sleeping like a baby.

It is the critics, he said, the critics have the ideas. We artists (he included me)—we artists are just children at our games.

He is at that point in life at which neither returning to the beginning nor advancing to the end seems bearable; therefore, he has decided to stop, here, in the midst of things, though this makes him an obstacle to others, such as ourselves. But we must not give up hope; in my own life, she continued, there was such a time, though that was long ago.

When you hear this again, she said, perhaps the words will be less intimidating, if you remember how you first heard them, in the voice of a little girl.

Feeling has departed—it occurs to me this would make a fine headstone.