Gloria
Friday, June 02, 2006
Gloria
"...I can almost look down the tracks and see you going but without you, dearest, I can't see or hear or feel or think. Being apart - whatever has happened or will happen to us - is like begging for mercy from a storm, Anthony; it's like growing old. I want to kiss you so - in the back of your neck where your old black hair starts. Because I love you and whatever we do or say to each other, or have done, or have said, you've got to feel how much I do, how inanimate I am when you're gone. I can't even hate the damnable presence of people, those people in the station who haven't any right to live - I can't resent them even though they're dirtying up our world, because I'm engrossed in wanting you so.
If you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me - how absurd this sounds - I'd still want you, I'd still love you. I know my darling.
In a few hours you'll wake up, my darling - and you'll be miserable, and disgusted with life. You'll ve in Delaware or Carolina or somewhere and so unimportant. I don't believe there's any one alive who can contemplate themselves as an impermanent institution, as a luxury or an unnecessary evil. Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I...
...Still I can see you. There's blue haze about the trees where you'll be passing, too beautiful to be predominant. No, the fallow squares of earth will be most frequent - they'll be along beside the track like dirty coarse brown sheets drying in the sun, alive, mechanical, abominable. Nature, slovenly old hag, has been sleeping in them with every old farmer or Negro or immigrant who happened to covet her...
So you see that now you're gone I've written a letter all full of contempt and despair. And that just means that I love you Anthony, with all there is to love within your
Gloria
..."
--- Gloria Gilbert, The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"...I can almost look down the tracks and see you going but without you, dearest, I can't see or hear or feel or think. Being apart - whatever has happened or will happen to us - is like begging for mercy from a storm, Anthony; it's like growing old. I want to kiss you so - in the back of your neck where your old black hair starts. Because I love you and whatever we do or say to each other, or have done, or have said, you've got to feel how much I do, how inanimate I am when you're gone. I can't even hate the damnable presence of people, those people in the station who haven't any right to live - I can't resent them even though they're dirtying up our world, because I'm engrossed in wanting you so.
If you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me - how absurd this sounds - I'd still want you, I'd still love you. I know my darling.
In a few hours you'll wake up, my darling - and you'll be miserable, and disgusted with life. You'll ve in Delaware or Carolina or somewhere and so unimportant. I don't believe there's any one alive who can contemplate themselves as an impermanent institution, as a luxury or an unnecessary evil. Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I...
...Still I can see you. There's blue haze about the trees where you'll be passing, too beautiful to be predominant. No, the fallow squares of earth will be most frequent - they'll be along beside the track like dirty coarse brown sheets drying in the sun, alive, mechanical, abominable. Nature, slovenly old hag, has been sleeping in them with every old farmer or Negro or immigrant who happened to covet her...
So you see that now you're gone I've written a letter all full of contempt and despair. And that just means that I love you Anthony, with all there is to love within your
Gloria
..."
--- Gloria Gilbert, The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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on Friday, June 02, 2006 at 11:48 PM.
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