3397. “The loss of all hope … does not deprive human reality of its possibilities; it is simply a way of being towards these same possibilities”
Sartre on The Sound and the Fury
At least once a day I lose all hope. I lie down and sleep with the TV on, thinking about all the things I’m not watching, and wonder whether, if I wake up just in time, the channel I’m on will have a special report showing me just how, just now,
Note: “There’s another way out of this room” (Mad Men).
3399. “show of grief”
Wakes are of special interest here, because persons longest
on the spot will have “worked through” some of their affective
concerns about the deceased, while at the same time they
are likely to have been the closest to him and to be therefore
held most responsible for giving a worthy show of grief.
Erving Goffman, “Accessible Engagements: The Regulation
of Mutual-Involvement,” Behavior in Public Places
Those in-between mournings when your heart’s just not in it—those imperfectly present, tense mornings, when you’ve been awake for too long to feel much of anything—when your heart is missing in action from all its usual places, especially your favorite of its usual places—the place in the story where you are brought up to tell the story of the one you knew best to admire. How much easier it is to tell the ones about those you never or barely knew, and admired all the same, than it is to take your turn at telling the Story of Stories: the one about the one you knew well enough to love. You’ve got nothing to add to this one—except every value you’ve ever had added to you, and every one you’ve ever hoped to add yourself.
Note: “We’ll / Stay in touch. So they have it all the time. But all was strange” (Ashbery, “A Wave”).
3422. “It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was”
When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid
portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the
wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor
was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He
was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till
they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
It happens all the time: you work so hard pretending to be something you can’t possibly be (exquisite youth and beauty, well past your fiftieth birthday, for example), that by the time the person you really are finally surfaces in full view, that full you is a total goner. And if you’d just let the half you’ve hidden see the light of day—who knows, maybe the two of you (the half doing the hiding and the half being hidden), put together, could have been fully a friend to you.
Who knows? Maybe it’s not too late.
Note: “her hair down … like an early Methodist” (George Eliot, Middlemarch).