“Life, what was that?”

Through the window, the shades not yet drawn, came the epiphany, striking her, when she sat combing through a tightly matted vine of words and voices. “Life,” Rachel Vinrace thought, “what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing.” In that moment, the vague aspirations and hopefulness of a young woman shattered in The Voyage Out—her first. And what was I left with, the reader? Not the spiraling elegance of Virginia Woolf, or the sound of Rachel tapping her finger on the arm of a chair to center herself. It was the wind stirring in the leaves of the trees where I sat, the first sounds of creation, and visualizing this window here of innocence lost.

On the Narrow Ledge

Biology is not destiny. Each of us should be be free to choose our life, free of children or not, mindful of the admonishment, “Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Consider the emptiness of a life without choice. Consider Miranda, the young woman at the center of Katherine Anne Porter’s short story, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” Miranda is sick and alone in the hospital during the 1918 flu epidemic, and thousands are dying around her, including a soldier she feverishly thinks about—a relationship that may be more imaginary than real.

Porter writes, “She lay on a narrow ledge, over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it… thinking, There it is, there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all.”

Our place in the universe on this narrow ledge?

“Words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all.”

— May 2024 —