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The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter—and
In some indescribable way it seemed kinder to deceive a person who took pride in runner beans than it was to force her to accept the fact that the world had changed.
It was a long time ago. It was yesterday.
All actresses have favorite words, and gloaming was one of Laurel’s. It was a pleasure to articulate, the sense of falling gloom and helpless encompassment inherent within the word’s sound, and yet it was so close to glowing that some of the latter’s shine rubbed off on it, too.
But still that face remained, every aspect bright with mischief, even now. Her eyes, though tired, had the glint of one who never stopped expecting to be amused, and her mouth turned up at the corners as if she’d just remembered a joke. It was the sort of face that drew strangers, that enchanted them and made them want to know her better. The way she had of making you feel, with a slight twitch of the jaw, that she too had suffered as you did, that everything would be better now simply for having come within her orbit: that was her real beauty—her presence, her joy, her magnetism. That, and
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He sometimes felt he was stealing a piece of their souls, snatching a private moment for himself when he took his shot, but Jimmy didn’t take the transaction lightly; they were joined, he and his subjects. They watched him from his walls, and he felt a debt to them, not only in having borne witness to a fixed instant in their human experience, but also to the ongoing responsibility of keeping their stories alive.
She smiled with a feigned lack of comprehension (Hogwarts?); he met it with one of sympathetic realization (Muggle), and they both moved on.
the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped.
(As a side note—don’t you find it remarkable, Katy, that the whole world can be involved in this madness we call war, and all the while the flowers and the bees and the seasons keep on doing what they must, wise but never weary in their wait for humanity to come to its senses and remember the beauty of life?
Faced with seeing him now, the joy that pulsed beneath her skin when she pictured him arriving through that door, the fall of dark hair over his eyes, the smile that suggested secret things, that made her feel understood—recognized, before he said a single word—she couldn’t believe she’d found the strength to go through with it.
