卿卿如晤-第一章

卿卿如晤 A Grief Observed

C. S. Lewis

1961

曾珍珍譯

第一章

從未有人告訴我，喪偶的悲慟和懼怕的感覺原來這麼相近。我並不怕，但感覺上却像在怕着什麼似的。胃裡同樣有某種東西在那裡翻攪，同樣坐立難安，呵欠連連，老在吞口水。

另有些時候，感覺上又像微微喝醉了酒，或者腦部受到輕微的震盪。在世界和我之間，隔有一層看不見的幔子。我發現自己很難聽進任何人對我說的話，或許很難叫自己提起勁來聽人說話。一切看來都那麼索然無味；但是，我却又希望周圍有人。整棟房子空蕩蕩的感覺，叫人想起就怕；最好身邊有人，而他們又彼此交談，不來找我說話。

又有些時刻，多数是些意想不到的時刻，我裡頭似乎有樣東西在那裡試圖向我證明；其實我並不那麼在乎，至少並不那麼要命地在乎。愛情不是男人生命的全部；没遇見她之前，我不是挺快樂的嗎？我擁有許多所謂的「資產」。這款事，日子一久，感覺便自然淡了。算了吧，何必這麼失魂落魄。以上的說辞，我竟然聽得進去，不覺有點慚愧，想想，似乎不無道理。就在這當兒，一道火辣辣的回憶突然襲上心頭，於是，所有這些「理當這樣，理當那樣的推想」頓時一溜烟消失，像炉口的一只螞蟻。

這一反弹，我的眼淚馬上奪眶而出，整個人陷入哀憐中。多麼温吞無力的眼淚。我寧可號啕大哭，這樣至少讓人覺得痛快、真實。但是，像現在這般沉浸在自憐中，咀嚼着溫情那令人作嘔的黏黏膩膩的快感，連自己都極端厭煩。然而，我還是沈溺在自艾自憐中，雖然明知這樣實在愧對她。因為只要任憑這種情緒囂張下去，不出片刻，我所哀悼的，便不是一個真正的女人，乃在對着一具人偶嚶嚶哭泣。謝天謝地，她依然鮮明地活在我的記憶中，不容許我和稀泥含糊過去（她可會永遠這般鮮活？）。

她全然不像這個樣子的。她的心思靈敏、矯健，像頭豹，激情也罷，温柔也罷，或者痛苦，一概無法叫它稍稍懈怠。你的話中一有虚矯或和稀泥的味道，它馬上嗅出，随即凌空一躍，在你還來不及分辨到底發生了什麼事時，它已把你撲倒在地。我的泡沫般的講論被她一語戳破的，不知有多少？我早就學會不跟她胡扯了，除非純粹為了好玩，為了享受被揭穿、被嘲笑的樂趣......唉，又是另一樁火辣辣的回憶。自從當了她的情人，我再也含糊不了了。

也從未有人告訴我，守喪容易使人懶散。除了在工作的地方，我這部機器似乎頗能照常運作之外，任何需要費點神的事一律讓我覺得厭煩。别說寫信，連讀封信都覺煩。刮鬍子也煩，現在誰管你臉頰光滑或粗糙？有人說，不快樂的男人應該找些事來分神，也就是一些能讓人忘我的事。其實，一個男人累壞了，在夜裡覺得需要加條棉被，他會像狗一樣，寧可躺在那裡渾身發抖，也懶得爬起來找被子。為什麼孤單的人比較容易邋遢？這不難了解。恐怕到頭來還變得骯髒透了，處處惹人嫌。

同時，神在哪裡呢？這樣的懷疑是喪偶最令人不安的併發症之一。當你很快樂，快樂到不覺得需要神，快樂到覺得神對你的要求有點近乎煩擾，這時，你若醒轉過來感謝祂，讚美祂，祂會張開手臂迎接你——或者你這樣覺得。但是，當你迫切需要祂時，當所有其他的救援全都落空時，你發現什麼呢？一扇當著你的面砰然關閉的門，從裡頭還傳出上門栓——双重門栓——的声音。你乾脆離開算了，再多等，那種死寂只會叫人發慌。窗内不見任何灯光，可能是棟空房子哩，曾被住過嗎？看來一度被住過。這看來曾有人住過的感覺與眼前的死寂是一樣的確切。什麼意思呢？為何我們一帆風順時，祂儼然存在着，像個指揮若定的船長；可是，危難當頭，作為救援者的祂反而杳然無踪？

今大下午，我試著把這些想法稍稍透露給C.。他提醒我，同樣的事似乎也曾發生在基督身上。“你為什麽離棄我呢？"——基督說過這句話，我知道。這能帮助我了解自己的處境嗎？

我想，問題不在於我正陷入不再相信神的危險中；真正的危險在於我開始相信與神有關的一些可怕的事。我所害怕的結論並非「所以，神並不存在」，而是「原來，神是這樣子的，不要再欺騙自己。」

前人乖順地說：「願你的旨意成全。」多少時候，蝕心的悲憤被恐懼的本身鎮伏住了。另一方面，又假借愛的行動虚掩内心真正的感受——是的，無論從哪一個角度看，這句話所透露的，其實只是一種表面的做作。

我們最需要祂的時候，神似乎連個影子都没有，因為祂根本就不在，不存在。這樣說，倒也容易。不過，為什麼當我們，坦白說，不需要祂時，祂却又如影随形，甩也甩不掉？

然而，有一件事是婚姻帶給我的体會。我不再相信：信仰原是潛意識裡慾望得不到滿足所投射出來的產物，因此，是性的替代品。短短幾年，她和我盡情享受了愛的筵席——各種型態的愛情——莊嚴的、快活的、浪漫的、寫實的，有時像暴風雨一樣高潮迭起，有時又像套上合脚拖鞋那樣輕鬆、自然。心靈或肉体的每一處空隙都得到了滿足。若說神是愛情的替代品，我倆應不會再對祂感興趣。擁有了實物之後，誰還會繼續求索替代品呢？然而，事實却非這樣。我們兩人都明白得很，除了彼此之外，我們還需要某樣東西——某樣完全不同類别的東西。這是一種完全不同類别的需求。否則，不如說，當情侣擁有彼此時，就不再需要閱讀、吃飯——或呼吸。

幾年前一位朋友去世之後，有好長一段時日，一種鮮明的感覺讓我確信他仍存在著，甚至比活着時更亢奮地存在著。我一直祈求對她能有百分之一同樣的把握。——但是，我得不到任何的回應，只有閉鎖的門、鐵幕、空茫、絕對的零。「有所求的就得不到。」我偏偏傻傻地求。現在呢，即使那樣的把握臨到我，我也不會相信了。我會認為那不過是祈禱所引發的自我催眠罷了。

無論如何，我絕不能去找那些通靈的人。我答應過她絕不作這種事。他們那些人的勾當，她很清楚。

向死者，或住何人，遵守諾言，原是件好事。不過，我開始察覺「尊重死者的意願」可以是這陷阱。昨天，若非我及時煞住，我會說出這樣無聊的話：「她不喜歡這樣。」這對别人實在不公平。不出幾天我大概會利用「她喜歡這樣」在家裡横行霸道.....用想像中她所喜歡的來推動我自己的意願。不過，這種偽裝會愈來愈薄弱、無效。

我根本無法和孩子們談起有關她的事。只要我一閉口，出現在他們臉上的，並非悲傷、愛、懼怕，或同情，而是所有人際絕緣体中最讓人無地自容的——尷尬。他們的表情似乎告訴我，我正在做一件極不体面的事。他們衷心希望我適可而止。記得母親剛去世時，每當父親提起她時，我也有同樣的感受。不能怪他們，男孩子就是這樣。

有些時候，我認為，羞耻心——那老讓人覺得不好意思的，没頭没腦的羞耻心，在阻止人作出和善的舉動，或享受坦蕩蕩的快樂上，與我們的劣根性是異曲同工的。而且，不只男孩有這局限。

或許孩子們是對的。對這本被我寫了又寫，蛮可怕的薄薄的手記。她本人會怎麽想呢？這些塗鴉難道是病態的嗎？我曾讀過這樣的句子：「由於牙痛，我整夜躺著，無法入睡，腦裡一直繞著牙痛和失眠這兩件事打轉。」——相當寫實，不是嗎？可以這麼說，悲哀的事件之所以悲哀，部分原因在於它有影子或投影——事實上，你不只受苦，還必須不断地咀嚼著你正在受苦這一回事。我不只天天活在悲慟中度日如年，更糟的是，成天就在反覆思想自己天天活在悲慟中度日如年。這些塗鴉是件只會使這一傾向更加惡化？只會使自己的心思不断地繞著同一主題打轉，單調得像踩水車？但是，我又能作什麽呢？我必須服藥，而，此刻，閱讀絕非一帖够强的藥。藉着把全部心思寫下來，我相信自已稍能置身事外。（全部？──才不呢，不過千頭萬緒之一。）我向來都是這樣對她辯護寫作的功能的。然而，十有九次，她總會從我的辯詞中看出漏洞來。

不只孩子們這樣，喪妻給我帶來一樣奇怪的副產品，我察覺自己讓每個遇見我的熟人感到尷尬。在工作的地方，在社交場合，在街上，我看見人們在向我走來的時候，都得拿捏是否要「說幾句慰問的話」。我恨他們慰問我，不慰問我嘛，我也恨。有些人乾脆躲起來。R已經避開我一個星期了。倒是那些有教養的年輕人應對的方式，我比較能接受，這些還没長大的的男生，瞧他們迎面走來的表情，活像我是個牙医。他們滿臉通紅，訕訕然應付一下，随即在礼貌許可下，趕緊溜到啤酒屋的另一角。也許，喪偶的人應該像麻瘋患者一樣，最好隔離在特定的防疫區。

對有些人而言，我不只讓他們感到尷尬，更糟的是，我簡直就是死亡的化身。每當遇見一對如仙眷侣，我可以感覺他倆心裡都在思量：「我們當中不知哪個人，有天也會落入他現在的光景？」

起初，我很害怕重訪那些她和我曾經度過美好時光的地方：我倆喜歡的啤酒屋，經常散步的林子。不過，我還是決定立刻舊地重遊，這就像等不及要把方才嘗過觸礁苦頭，驚魂甫定的舵手速速遣派出海一樣。然而，與我預料中的竟然完全不同。這些地方與其他地方没什麼兩樣。她已不在的事實在這些地方並不比其他地方顯著。她的亡去原與地方無關。我想，如果有個人被禁吃鹽，他對鹽味的感覺，在某種食物中絕不會比在其他食物中更為敏銳。整体說來，應是一天的三餐通通失了味。正是這麼一回事，生活整個改觀了。她已不在了，這事實像天空一樣籠罩一切。

不，這樣說並不完全正確。她已不在的事實在某一個角落裡帶給我切身的感受，是我無法逃避的。我指的是自己的肉体。當它是她的情人的肉体時，它有著截然不向的重要性。現在，它彷佛一棟空蕩蕩的房子。不過，别讓我欺騙自己，一旦我認為這具皮囊有了什麼毛病，它馬上又重要起來。這日子不遠了。

癌，癌，癌！我的母親，我的父親，我的妻子。我懷疑下一個輪到誰。

然而，當她飽受癌的凌遲，知道自己已不久於人世時，竟然說她已不再像從前那樣覺得癌的可怕了。當事實臨到時，名稱和它所代表的概念，在某種程度上，已失去了威力。我幾乎可以了解這到底是怎麼回事。這點非常重要。我們從未遇見純粹的癌、戰争、愁苦（或快樂）；我們所遇見的是臨到眼前的每一時每一刻，以及這些時刻裡，各式各樣的起起落落。最美好的時光裡有許多不美的瑕疵；最惡劣的時光裡有許多美好的片刻。我們從未受到所謂事物之本体的澈底冲擊。這樣的稱謂本來就是錯的。事物的本体不過是這些起起落落的總和；名或概念是其次的。

說來也許叫人難以相信，當一切的希望都落空之後，我們竟然還在一起享受了許多極其歡樂、快活的時光。最後一夜是在聊天中度過的。我們聊得那麼長久，那麼安詳，那麼使彼此獲得滋潤。

然而，說「在一起」，却未必盡然。「夫妻一体」是有限度的。你無法真的分担另一個人的軟弱、懼怕、或疼痛。你可能覺得不好受，想家中也許恰如對方所感到的那般難受；雖然若有人這麼說，我未必相信。就算是吧，仍然大有區别。方才我提到懼怕，指的是純粹動物性的懼怕，是有機生物面對毁滅時的臨陣畏怯，是那種透不過氣來的感覺，覺得自己像只陷在牢籠裡的老鼠。這些感覺是無法替代。心靈可以同感，肉体較難做到。從某一方面說，情人的肉体尤難做到。兩人之間一切愛的交接早已訓練他們對彼此的肉体存有互補的，並存的，甚至相反的，絕非相同的感覺。

我倆心知肚明。我自有我的愁苦，不關她的。她自有她的愁苦，不關我的。她的愁苦結束時，我的愁苦將進入全盛期。我們正往分道揚鑣的路上走去。這一冰冷的事實，這一可怕的交通規則——「你，太太，請往右走。你，先生，請往左去。」——只是死亡所帶來的隔絕的一個開端罷了。

這樣的分隔，我想，正等着臨到所有的人。我一直以為她和我特别不幸，竟然這樣被拆開了。但是，這應是所有天下有情人共同的結局。有一回，她對我說：「即使我倆恰恰在同一瞬間去世，就像現在這樣，身子捱著身子躺著，這與你所害怕的另一種情形，仍是一樣的分隔。」當然，她自己不見得全然知道，就像我不知道一樣，不過，當時她已瀕臨死亡，够她料中的。她曾引用過一句話「孤獨進入孤獨」──說，死讓人覺得就是這樣。是啊，毫不可能是另外的樣子。是時間、空間、和肉体把我們聚合在一起的，這些是我們藉以溝通的綫路。把一端剪断，或同時剪断兩端，無論那一種情况，通話都必須戛然中止，不是嗎？

除非你能想出其他的溝通途径，立刻取而代之，方式完全不同，却有相同的功能。若是這樣，你想，有什麼理由可以解釋為何要把原來的綫路切断呢？這樣，神豈是像個小丑，前一刻把你手裡的一碗湯用鞭子打掉，只為了下一刻又補給你一碗完全同樣的湯？甚至大自然都不是這樣的一個小丑。她所弹奏的曲調從未什兩次是一模一樣的。

有人大言不慚：「根本没有死亡」，或「死算不了什麼！」對這種人，我最不耐煩。明明有死亡這回事，而且，實際存有的事都不容漠視，任何發生了的事都會帶來某種結局。死亡和事情的結局又都是無法轉寰、無法挽回的。何不乾脆說一個生命的誕生也算不了什麼呢？我抬頭張望夜空，有什麼比這更確定的呢？——即使我被容許到處尋索，在這麼浩瀚的各樣時空裡，我仍然找不到她的音容、觸摸。她死了。她是死了的。死，這個字難道那麼難懂？。

我擁有的她的照片中，没有一張令我滿意。我甚至無法在自己的想像裡清晰地看見她的容顏。可是，今天早上我在人群中見到的一張古怪的臉，雖然陌生，晚上，當我閉起眼睛，竟能十足活現在腦海裡。理由非常簡單，最熟的人的臉，我們曾在各種不同的景况中看過，那麼多不同的角度，不同的光暈，不同的表情——醒着的、睡着的、笑、哭、吃飯、說話、沉思——所有的印象一下子聚集到記憶中來，重叠交錯，模糊不清。不過，她的声音猶仍在耳。我所記得的那道声音——能在任何的時刻，把我變成一個愛哭的小孩。

CHAPTER ONE

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky sweet pleasure of indulging it—that disgusts me. And even while I’m doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent H. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. Thank God the memory of her is still too strong (will it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it.

For H. wasn’t like that at all. Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard. Passion, tenderness, and pain were all equally unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How many bubbles of mine she pricked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure—and there’s another red-hot jab—of being exposed and laughed at. I was never less silly than as H.’s lover.

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ I know. Does that make it easier to understand?

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’

Our elders submitted and said, ‘Thy will be done.’ How often had bitter resentment been stifled through sheer terror and an act of love—yes, in every sense, an act—put on to hide the operation?

Of course it’s easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent—non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it quite frankly, we don’t ask for Him?

One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat—or breathe.

After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about H. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. ‘Them as asks don’t get.’ I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers.

At any rate I must keep clear of the spiritualists. I promised H. I would. She knew something of those circles.

Keeping promises to the dead, or to anyone else, is very well. But I begin to see that ‘respect for the wishes of the dead’ is a trap. Yesterday I stopped myself only in time from saying about some trifle ‘H. wouldn’t have liked that.’ This is unfair to the others. I should soon be using ‘what H. would have liked’ as an instrument of domestic tyranny, with her supposed likings becoming a thinner and thinner disguise for my own.

I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my own mother’s death when my father mentioned her. I can’t blame them. It’s the way boys are.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. And not only in boyhood.

Or are the boys right? What would H. herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all?—no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That’s how I’d defend it to H. But ten to one she’d see a hole in the defense.

It isn’t only the boys either. An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.

To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking, ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now.’

At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy—our favorite pub, our favorite wood. But I decided to do it at once—like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It’s not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.’s lover. Now it’s like an empty house. But don’t let me deceive myself. This body would become important to me again, and pretty quickly, if I thought there was anything wrong with it.

Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue.

Yet H. herself, dying of it, and well knowing the fact, said that she had lost a great deal of her old horror at it. When the reality came, the name and the idea were in some degree disarmed. And up to a point I very nearly understood. This is important. One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself.’ But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.

It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone. How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly, we talked together that last night!

And yet, not quite together. There’s a limit to the ‘one flesh.’ You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, or fear or pain. What you feel may be bad. It might conceivably be as bad as what the other felt, though I should distrust anyone who claimed that it was. But it would still be quite different. When I speak of fear, I mean the merely animal fear, the recoil of the organism from its destruction; the smothery feeling; the sense of being a rat in a trap. It can’t be transferred. The mind can sympathize; the body, less. In one way the bodies of lovers can do it least. All their love passages have trained them to have, not identical, but complementary, correlative, even opposite, feelings about one another.

We both knew this. I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine. The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic regulation (‘You, Madam, to the right—you, Sir, to the left’) is just the beginning of the separation which is death itself.

And this separation, I suppose, waits for all. I have been thinking of H. and myself as peculiarly unfortunate in being torn apart. But presumably all lovers are. She once said to me, ‘Even if we both died at exactly the same moment, as we lie here side by side, it would be just as much a separation as the one you’re so afraid of.’ Of course she didn’t know, any more than I do. But she was near death; near enough to make a good shot. She used to quote ‘Alone into the Alone.’ She said it felt like that. And how immensely improbable that it should be otherwise! Time and space and body were the very things that brought us together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn’t the conversation stop?

Unless you assume that some other means of communication—utterly different, yet doing the same work—would be immediately substituted. But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old ones? Is God a clown who whips away your bowl of soup one moment in order, next moment, to replace it with another bowl of the same soup? Even nature isn’t such a clown as that. She never plays exactly the same tune twice.

It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?

I have no photograph of her that’s any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination. Yet the odd face of some stranger seen in a crowd this morning may come before me in vivid perfection the moment I close my eyes tonight. No doubt, the explanation is simple enough. We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions—waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking—that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur. But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child.