The Ferryman

by Justin Cronin

It is not an easy thing, to leave a life, a home. The details dig trenches within one—scents, sounds, associations, rhythms.

Farewell to all of this and all of you, who gave me what passed for a life.

loss was love’s accounting,

The body collapses in a swift cascade of biological humiliations, a parade of pain.

What’s done is done, even if it’s everything.

Time itself has weight. It bears upon the mind—every joy, every regret, every minute of every day adding to the total—until

people are more complicated than they let on, and that even tragedy (sometimes only tragedy) can open the door to who we really are.

Did this happen to all married couples—that we became, over time, a union not of choice but of habit? I was glad for all of it—the consoling embraces, the cocoon of a warm bath, a nourishing dinner served by candlelight—yet

sweet, heartbreaking awareness of time’s passage, all things lapsing into the past.

The best thing about blindness, Pappi thinks, is that darkness doesn’t frighten you.

To be old is to be forgotten;

The world races by, a roaring river of humanity, and yet he is apart from it; it is a club in which he’s no longer a member.

There was within her a kind of incandescence, a life force, that I had never felt in another person.

will give you childhood, so that you might know innocence. Age, so you will know the prize of youth. Children, so that you will care for the future. Toil, so that you will know the value of a day. The body’s failings, so that you will know its worth. Death, so that you will cherish the bittersweet beauty of life.

We are, each of us, born a sparkling soul, clothed only in our newness; it is life that makes us what we are. You have been one thing; now you will learn to be another.

Time’s nibbling jaws can be slowed; they cannot be stopped.

Let us sleep, and dream, and do the work of being human.