She had gone and it was time for him to go also. It was over then. Dark swirlings and shadows filled his mind. A room filled also with echoes. “I got de trans-American mortification blues…” said Danny, weakly, and then he laughed, a little, for it was over.
“So, there are yet more tears and yet more tearings; a loss of rings, a truth of fears… at least we had no children. What mistakes? How to even approach the truth? Ah, if only I were younger.”
And he wasn't so old, but he felt old, for the first time realizing with an impact that the reward for living in such blindness for so many years was losing… losing.
- (
-
A routine, a routine blindness. The paper, the tv, the job brought home to worry him. There was not time to consider, not the will to consider considering. He was not driven by an image of success, he was not an extraordinarily harsh man either. Sometimes he vaguely remembered the days of his tenderness, his first romance, his wife’s long skirt like an old movie— but it flickered and passed, and he turned once again to forgetting, waiting for his old age when he would have nothing but memories to plague himself and his chance comrades with. He became daily more incompetent at the real business of living. If change came he would lose his imaginary footing.
)Meanwhile the sea of life rolled on about him; in the forest branches were broken by storms he saw described on tv, of no consequence… Children were born all the while he was forgetting his own miracles, eating his lunch calmly, using the phone, making passable love to his wife. people he never knew crying in tongues he had never heard the name or sound of were starving, dead; the ocean continued in its mystery of circles; great music was written and performed; men passed into ecstasy in foreign lands; women washing on the hillside of a stream in Persia. he walked the corridors of his life, shuffled papers, wrote memos, wars tore great holes in the souls of homeless children, he slept. he slept. Another man’s potential joy of torrents fading. God wept.
Danny turned the key, and reflected on the passage of many things. Down the street he walked, remembering sad songs, he who had not sung for a man’s real reasons for years upon themselves. It might well have been autumn, or that time of winter, that time of early morning when it seems it will be that time forever. Ah, so strange. He had only the fact of his walking to give him reasons for moving.