MihaElla ’s Reviews > Light in August > Status Update

I done come too far now, he says. I be dog if I’m going to quit now.
And her looking at him like she had known all the time what he was going to do before he even knew himself that he was going to, and that whatever he done, he wasn’t going to mean it.
Aint nobody never said for you to quit she says.
He laughs, lying in the bed, laughing. Yes, sir. You cant beat a woman.

He changed completely. They planned to be married. He knew now that he had seen all the while that desperate calculation in her eyes. Perhaps they were right in putting love into books, he thought quietly. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else. The desperation was still in them, but now that there were definite plans, a day set, it was quieter, mostly calculation.

And so when a year later she talked to him suddenly of marriage and escape in the same words, he was not surprised, not hurt. He just thought quietly, So this is love. I see. I was wrong about it too, thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to Life.

What was terrible was that she did not want to be saved.

’I’m not ready to pray yet,’ she said aloud, quietly, rigid, soundless, her eyes wide open, while the moon poured and poured into the window, filling the room with something cold and irrevocable and wild with regret.

Don’t make me have to pray yet. Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.

When he went to bed that night his mind was made up to run away. He felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage.

Nothing can look quite as lonely as a big man going along an empty street. Yet though he was not large, not tall, he contrived somehow to look more lonely than a lone telephone pole in the middle of a desert. In the wide, empty, shadowbrooded street he looked like a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost.