Poetic Justice (2011)
“Four KATE had been astonished at Frederick Clemance’s invitation to lunch. She felt as nervous, she told Reed, as a teenager on a first date. I mean, she tried to explain, I have worshipped him, or close to it, and what can we possibly find to say now, over an atrocious vegetable omelette at the Faculty Club. I know, Kate said, I am terrified, in Auden’s words, of discovering that a god worth kneeling-to for a while has tabernacled and rested.
Yet her first thought, when she and Clemance were s...eated, was how old he looked. The spring occurrences had aged him. He had allowed his white hair to grow long, which became him, since he now resembled not so much Emerson as Kate’s idea of Emerson. Yet it was not his white hair nor lined face nor sixty years which most distressed Kate, sitting opposite him, as his indefinable air of regret, perhaps even of despair.
“So it took a revolution for us to lunch together,” he said. “That is too bad. Well, perhaps it is all destiny—I think, you know, the Greeks were right: family curses are easier to live with than personal failure.”MoreLess
Yet her first thought, when she and Clemance were s...eated, was how old he looked. The spring occurrences had aged him. He had allowed his white hair to grow long, which became him, since he now resembled not so much Emerson as Kate’s idea of Emerson. Yet it was not his white hair nor lined face nor sixty years which most distressed Kate, sitting opposite him, as his indefinable air of regret, perhaps even of despair.
“So it took a revolution for us to lunch together,” he said. “That is too bad. Well, perhaps it is all destiny—I think, you know, the Greeks were right: family curses are easier to live with than personal failure.”MoreLess
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