The Lesson

The Weakness of Age

was such that Loring was entirely exhausted by the time she reached the grave. She had to pick her way carefully. That night happened to be extremely dark. There was no moon and the clouds were sufficient to dull any impression of stars. She sat on the ground there and sank her fingers in the earth.

— My love, she said.

It will perhaps confuse you if I explain that as she sat there, she heard in her head the playing of a concert they once saw in Munich, in their middle age. Young people always assume that such things require great powers of memory or concentration, but of course, all things come with time and chance, and all things that come of their own accord are in that way blessed with great strength. So it is that one may suddenly be visited by a memory with great presence, whether it is that of music, or the feeling of a day, or a sight seen from afar, a face, a sense of a period of one’s life as though a foot is dipped into a pool of water — yes, you see what I mean. What she heard was not the music itself; that would be absurd. Instead, for her there: what she felt to hear that music, and the sense of the music happening. Do not believe, oh my friends, that this is counterfeit, either. It is what we have. The sense of music swelling up into the broad night, with little fists of stone graves littered on the hill around…

So, she sat there awhile in the night until she was too tired to sit, and then she lay down, and soon fell asleep. When she woke it was the morning, and at least ten birds were in the tree above her head.

They were doing that bird thing that involves sleeping with the head under one wing. Another way of writing the above sentence would be, when she woke it was the morning, and ten headless birds were draped throughout the tree above her head. Of course, that would be misleading in the extreme, as when she woke, they woke too, and one after another beheld the glittering day. For them it was a moment of true significance, and having no shame, they sounded their horns, and climbed about on the shoulders of the branches with great impetuousness.

For Loring, it was a matter of sitting up again, and maneuvering to the tree, and sitting with her back to it. The gravestone was to her left, the greater part of the cemetery to her right. That there had been clouds in the sky the night before would in no way be evident any longer, as the endless blue whirling of the sky set about this way and that, and Loring closed her eyes again, and slept for another hour before the sun was full in her face, and drove her all the way home, though she went haltingly, weakly, and stopped often for rest. It is a difficulty, one might say, that the old who are strong willed do themselves harm with this will, for they never cease to demand too much until they no longer can and are swept away.