I shouldn't write feedback now, when I have so impossibly little time, but I just have to agree with everyone that this vignette is heartbreakingly beautiful. Emily Dickinson's poem serves as such an unbelievably poignant counterpoint to Lois's feelings. There is something about the poem, with its polished metre and rhyme which makes it so elegant and controlled, and so harmonious and melodious to listen to. And yet, the story it tells inside its polished stanzas is one of almost bottomless despair. It is about the despair of incurable loss. It is about a woman's loss, when her beloved man is gone. The whole poem is a scream, a silent scream followed by hopeless sobs, all of it dressed in the most elegant poetic clothing.
She was losing her mind - that was the truth. She was beginning to see Clark everywhere. He was every man walking down the street and in every darkened shadow that she passed.
For some reason, this part of your vignette was perhaps what moved me the most. Because it reminded me of the first time when my father was so sick, and the first time I thought he would die. I was so strongly reminded of a time when I had arrived at Malmö Central Station, getting off my commuter train as usual. The train station was full of people milling about, as usual. And suddenly, there he was, emerging out of the crowd and approaching me, smiling at me, my father. Not because we had agreed that he would come and meet me, but because he had come anyway, for no particular reason.
And then, when my father was so sick and I thought that he would die, it just hit me that if he did, then he would never emerge out of a crowd like that again. Never. Because the crowd wouldn't be keeping him for me. And I realized, just like that, how different crowds would be to me if he was gone. The crowds would be different, because they would never be keeping within themselves my father's face. Never again. And I realized how all of humanity would suddenly be different, because my father would no longer be one of those who milled and thronged across the face of the Earth. And I feel so desperately for Lois. How can she go on, when the man who brightened the crowds and all of humanity and the Earth and her life is gone? How can she? And yet, Emily Dickinson's heroine goes on, hoping aginst hope or else just hanging on, because that is what most people do anyway. They hang on, even when they have lost everything. Even when they are all broken inside and the polished and unbroken facade is all that holds them together.
Beautiful, Sue. Extremely beautiful and evocative.
Ann
