In those endless October nights, lying side by side in the darkness, toppled statues of ourselves, we sought escape from an intolerable present in the only tense possible, the past, that is, the faraway past. We went back over our earliest days together, reminding, correcting, helping each other, like two ancients tottering arm-in-arm along the ramparts of a town where they had once lived, long ago.
~John Banville's The Sea
Writing is one of the most powerful ways to deal with grief. Books have been written about coping with grief, I know of friends who pour out their despair on blogs, and of course, people who work out their own healing process through writing. Not to mention long letters written which are never sent.
To grief is to ache for something that has ceased to exist.
The Sea brings one into the world of grieving. Max Morden grieves for his recently deceased wife by making a trip to his place of childhood, which is paralled by a mental trip through his own past, a past where he had encountered the death of his childhood companions. In the wake of grieving, when one struggles to accept the insurmountable abyss, memories, an inferior version of present hopes and dreams, rushes to distract the gaze from the emptiness, though never actually filling it.
I love it when Banville describes the sleeping bodies as 'toppled statues of ourselves'. It adds such a tinge of godlikeness to the human stature, only to be undercut by connotations of decay and faded glory. Indeed, when we lay asleep at night, we are only a figment of our glorious selves in the daytime. It is also in the midst of darkness and dreams when we succumb to the forces and inclinations which we have fought so hard against during the day.
To Max Morden, it was during the night when he and Anna were empowered. Defeated by the reality of her incurable illness which surfaced all too loudly during the day, refuge and strength came when the darkness made the past permeable to the present. There is such a muted sense of longing, of desire, and of pain crying out to the reader; pain felt by Max and Anna when they struggled to hold on to each other, and pain felt by Max when Anna had ceased to exist. It is almost as if Banville has perfected the articulation of grief through a personal reflection.
The deepest stage of grief silently passes when one realises that one can finally look upon the emptiness full in the face. And accepts it for what it is.
As I stood there, suddenly, no, not suddenly, but in a sort of a driving heave, the whole sea surged, it was not a wave, but a smooth sailing swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself, and I was lifted briefly and carried a little way tpward the shore and then was set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
