The shock of death had made him
aware of youth already passed.
(…)
During recent years he had seldom
thought of her. But at first, after the divorce, the loss had almost destroyed
him. Then, after the anodyne of time, he had loved again, and then again. Jeannine,
she was now. Certainly his love for his ex-wife was long since past. So why the
unhinged body, the shaken mind? He knew only that his clouded heart was oddly
dissonant with the sunny, candid autumn day. Ferris wheeled suddenly and,
walking with long strides, almost running, hurried back to the hotel.
(…)
Why had he come? He suffered. His
own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage
of the years. He felt he could not bear much longer to stay in the family room.
(…)
The little boy stared at Ferris,
amazed and unbelieving. And Ferris’ eyes, as he returned the gaze, were somehow
unbelieving too. Was it indeed true that at one time he had called this
stranger, Elizabeth, Little Butterduck during nights of love, that they had
lived together, shared perhaps a thousand days and nights and –finally–
endured in the misery of sudden solitude the fiber by fiber (jealousy, alcohol
and money quarrels) destruction of the fabric of married love.
(…)
‘L’improvisation de la vie humaine’,
he said. ‘There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human
existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.’
(…)
Suspended above the ocean the
anxieties of transience and solitude no longer troubled him and he thought on
his father’s death with equanimity. During the dinner hour the plane reached
the shore of France.
(…)
New York at morning, this midnight
Paris. Ferris glimpsed the disorder of his life: the succession of cities, of
transitory loves; and time, the sinister glissando of the years, time always.
(…)
With inner desperation he pressed
the child close – as though an emotion as protean as his love could dominate
the pulse of time.
The Sojourner
CARSON MCCULLERS
