But I could not get into it. I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades? The world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each other’s faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far to feel the heat of the fire. Everything seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they? Yet when the most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog of remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else.
Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate about subjective things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange expression on his face. “But we are all like that!” he said. “That’s the way it is. For everyone in the world. Didn’t you know?”
from The Scarlet Ruse by John D. MacDonald, 1973
An earlier post on Travis McGee here.
I don’t think it is just the rhythm of this passage–though I have re-read it three times, now, to hear it lapping against the shores of my perception like the way water alternates trickling and sliding along granite in desert canyons–but also the way it aches to know the ineffable. It brings to my mind the beginning of one of the chapters in Burnett’s The Secret Garden. (I’ve just plunged into the stacks here at the library to try to put my hands on it, but it’s not to be located at this moment.) That chapter opens with an evocation of morning’s delicacy and waking into it wanting to know such perfect aliveness, I think, or something similar. I recognize, also, that sitting in a very public library letting McDonald’s words dance with echoes from my childhood’s affair with reading, as if I am here all alone in my dreaming, is also a bit like what he describes. (and then reaching into the glow of a computer screen…!!)
I’m glad your book is enroute to Flagstaff, Kelley; thank you, also, to your response to my mother’s dozing. I planted more flowers: petunias this time.
While I was reading it, I expected to get to the end and find that it was from “Notes from Underground” by Dostoevsky. But there is a little more hope in it. Thanks for posting it.