I love this passage from Pale Gray for Guilt by John T. MacDonald
"So they sat, holding hands, and Jan fell asleep.
Puss gave me a sleepy wink and then she was gone
too. I looked out of the jet at December gray, at
cloud towers reaching up toward us. Tush was gone,
and too many others were gone, and I sought chill
comfort in an analogy of death that has been with
me for years. It doesn't explain or justify. It just
seems to remind me how things are.
Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down
between rocky walls: There is a long, shallow bar of
sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of
the river. It is under water. You are born and you
have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where
everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones
older than you, are upriver from you. The younger
ones stand braced on the bar downriver. And the
whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of
time, washing away at the upstream end and building
up downstream.
Your time, the time of all your contemporaries,
schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that
part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is
crowded at first. You can see ·the way it thins out,
upstream from you. The old ones are washed away
and their bodies go swiftly by, like logs in the current.
Downstream where the younger ones stand
thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash
away. Always there is more room where you stand,
but always the swift water grows deeper, and you
feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your
feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for
a safer place can nudge you off balance, and you are
gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long
time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their
hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are
gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the
roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of sand
and gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as
the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken
by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good
place, well braced, understanding currllnts and balance,
last a long time. A Churchill, fat cigar atilt,
sourly amused at his own endurance and, in the
end, indifferent to rivers and the rage of waters. Far
downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of
the ones who never got planted, never got set, never
quite understood the message of the torrent.
Tush was gone, and our part of the bar was emptier,
and the jet raced from the sunset behind us to
the night ahead, and beside me slept the two
women, hand in hand, their lashes laying against the
high flesh of their cheeks with a heartbreaking precision,
a childish surrender, an inexpressible vulnerability."
