The sorrow next door
It must be something about being a woman, but it seems that every few months or so, you need a good cry. And so what you need is something to let you indulge. The other night my flatmate had just headed out to a movie and said on the way ‘I feel like a good cry’ and I thought ‘yeah, me too!’. Then I curled up on the couch with my book while I rained outside, which, to me, is some kind of bliss. I was reading Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot. Her books really need to be republished with new names, because who, these days, is going to pick up a book called ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’. The first story is about a curate called Amos Barton, and up until this point in the book it had not been overly enthralling – lots of humorous and not-so-humorous gossip amongst the parishioners about said curate and so forth. But then I got to this paragraph:
For not having a fertile imagination, as you perceive, and being unable to invent thrilling incidents for your amusement,
my only merit must lie in the faithfulness with which I represent to you the humble experience of an ordinary fellow-mortal. I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles – to win your tears for real sorrow: sorrow such as may live next door to you – such as walks neither in rags nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel.
And after that I got my good weep over this beautifully sad page:
The burial was over, and Amos turned with his children to re-enter the house – the house where, an hour ago, Milly’s dear body lay, where the windows were half-darkened, and sorrow seemed to have a hallowed precinct for itself, shut out from the world. But now she was gone; the broad snow-reflected daylight was in all the rooms; the Vicarage again seemed part of the common working-day world, and Amos, for the first time, felt that he was alone – that day after day, month after month, year after year, would have to be lived through without Milly’s love. Spring would come, and she would not be there; summer, and she would not be there; and he would never have her again with him by the fireside in the long evenings. The seasons all seemed irksome to his thoughts; and how dreary the sunshiny days that would be sure to come! She was gone from him; and he could never show here his love any more, never make up for omissions in the past by filling future days with tenderness.
O the anguish of that thought, that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know.
Amos Barton had been an affectionate husband, and while Milly was with him, he was never visited by the thought that perhaps his sympathy with her was not quick and watchful enough; but now he relived all their life together, with that terrible keenness of memory and imagination which bereavement gives, and he felt as if his very love needed a pardon for its poverty and selfishness.
No outward solace could counteract the bitterness of this inward woe. But outward solace came …