Perfection of the Morning
“I was both rather proud of my own daring and a little appalled at it; the image of a burning bridge was strong in my mind, and I stoked the flames gleefully, with a feeling close to triumph.
Although they said nothing, I knew both my friends and my family thought I was making a terrible mistake. Such is the prestige of a university job, the sense of those who make a life there as being the annointed, that my fellow graduate students and lecturers must have found my abdication from it very hard ...to understand. If my mother and sisters were collectively holding their breaths, not wanting to pass judgment and hoping against hope for the best, I knew my friends expected me to be back, newly divorced, in a year if not sooner, for marriage breakdown was happening all around us at the time—divorce, separation, reshuffling of couples, more split-ups, more divorces, more unhappiness.
And the truth was, in that first two or three years of my new life, I often said to myself that if I’d really understood what I was getting into, I’d never have done it, not realizing before I left that if my own family and friends had their private doubts about our marriage, the same was true of Peter’s family, his friends, even his hired man.MoreLess
Although they said nothing, I knew both my friends and my family thought I was making a terrible mistake. Such is the prestige of a university job, the sense of those who make a life there as being the annointed, that my fellow graduate students and lecturers must have found my abdication from it very hard ...to understand. If my mother and sisters were collectively holding their breaths, not wanting to pass judgment and hoping against hope for the best, I knew my friends expected me to be back, newly divorced, in a year if not sooner, for marriage breakdown was happening all around us at the time—divorce, separation, reshuffling of couples, more split-ups, more divorces, more unhappiness.
And the truth was, in that first two or three years of my new life, I often said to myself that if I’d really understood what I was getting into, I’d never have done it, not realizing before I left that if my own family and friends had their private doubts about our marriage, the same was true of Peter’s family, his friends, even his hired man.MoreLess
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