EARLY on the March morning when I left Sargentville for Washington to spend a month there and then further south in the sun, it was very cold, sixteen degrees below zero. The sea smoke on the water of the cove was stiff with frozen air, standing straight up in peaks and not moving, like tightly whipped cream.
I closed the door to the house which seemed to have a prescient, lonely air about it. I felt like a deserter who had heartlessly left behind someone who had sheltered her warmly against the harsh elements, against all the discouragement and disillusion of an inward journey.
“In every parting there is an image of death,” observed George Eliot. Yes, I thought, but, like Dilsey in Faulkner’s novel, I believed I would endure, even the death of the city. I would survive this parting and return here soon, to renew my acquaintance with myself. Like Don Quixote, I have learned that, until death, it is all life.
About the Author
Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies, and Chamber Music, has been literary editor of the New Republic, a nonfiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1994 by Doris Grumbach
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7665-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Fifty Days of Solitude Page 9