Reserves

So we come to the end. Not a bad run. Let be all the fussing. It could well be worse; it has been worse. Let the hands drop loosely to the sides. We have been outwitted, outgeneraled, at the last. When the French general sent to retrieve Sedan asked after the reserves, he was told there are no reserves. Which was, he said later, when he realized that the war was lost.

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Things break sometimes. Sometimes things are irretrievable. Friends and lovers die, and so do enemies; and suddenly all our plans for them are revealed for what they are: sequences of thought, patterns of expectation. Oh yes, they seem real, before you take off the lenses of immortality. Practical people never take them off, of course, so they are helpless in the face of death, and they run from every hint of it. "Take a realistic view," they say, by which they mean "Keep pretending we will all live forever, and resolutely ignore the occasional disappearances!" And they settle the lenses tighter on their noses, and scoff at the dreamers and sentimentalists, who read poems by dead poets and listen to music by dead composers and visit the graves of old friends. And who talk to the dead who cluster at their windows in the early morning.

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"But -- haven't you died?" the children ask the apparition of their friend, in Lewis's book, and the friend answers, "Most people have, you know."

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Herriot writes of looking at the necrotic paw of a dog slowly, nobly, and patiently recovering from having been caught in a trap. The rotting flesh had sloughed off clear down to the bone, and as Herriot looked at it he suddenly saw the metacarpals and phalanges of a human hand. Not so different, under the flesh.

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When I came to pick up Alan, Jonquil's mother appeared from the back, in a skimpy black skirt and tube top, which she couldn't quite carry off, at forty. She refuses to be an adult. Trickles profanity and scorn, flirts with her daughters' friends, and imposes her will by tantrum or trickery, when she can, rather than by authority. And she's quite right that accepting the authority of a mother is the beginning of accepting all kinds of decay. Our culture generally harbors contempt for this particular refusal. But there are dozens of others just as destructive, which we by and large encourage. Never give up on your dreams, we say. Well, Jonquil's mother hasn't. That's what it looks like, not giving up on your dreams.

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Jonquil insisted on coming with me to the store. At the checkout line, she methodically turned around the first magazine in each slot, so that the whole rack was a row of back-page ads. She has the adolescents' faith in oddity and inconvenience leading to awareness. She doesn't understand that the real enemy of awareness is not complacency, but exhaustion. "The beginning of revolution, Jonquil," I didn't say, "is a good night's sleep. Don't make anyone's life harder than it has to be."