Another "big one" I hadn't got around to until now, is Eudora Welty, Mississippi's Pulitzer Prize-winning author. I recently read the book that garnered that award, "The Optimist's Daughter". What a beautiful piece of simplicity and understatement, told straightforwardly, without frills, with tenderness. The following passage moved me deeply, as the main character, Laurel, reflects first on her dead parents, then on to her husband, Phil, who died at a young age:
"A flood of feeling descended on Laurel. She let the papers slide from her hand and the books from her knees, and put her head down on the open lid of the desk and wept in grief for love and for the dead. She lay there with all that was adamant in her yielding to this night, yielding at last. Now all she had found had found her. The deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself, and it began to flow again.
If Phil could have lived -
But Phil was lost. Nothing of their life together remained except in her own memory; love was sealed away into its perfection and had remained there.
If Phil had lived -
She had gone on living with the old perfection undisturbed and undisturbing. Now by her own hands, the part had been raised up, and he looked at her, Phil himself - here waiting all the time, Lazarus. He looked at her out of eyes wild with the craving for his unlived life, with mouth open like a funnel's.
What would have been their end, then? Suppose their marriage had ended like her father and mother's? Or like her mother's? Like -
'Laurel! Laurel! Laurel!' Phil's voice cried.
She wept for what happened to life.
'I wanted it!' Phil cried. His voice rose with the wind in the night and went around the house and around the house. It became a roar. 'I wanted it!'"
Currently watching : A Star Is Born
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