COMEY’S CHOICES
In July, Comey told us his conclusion, after extensively investigating Hillary’s emails. His team were looking for possible breaches in security and the possible breaking of laws. His conclusion: he and the searches could find no reason to recommend an indictment of Hillary Clinton on any provable charge. That was his duty: to report to the American people.
But he did not execute that duty properly. He went further. He broke a code of never elaborating in detail upon his findings, or on his OPINION of Hillary’s actions. He called her actions “reckless” but not criminal. Comey went too far. Why?
The only answer can be, the ONLY ANSWER can be, that he felt PERSONALLY that she had behaved badly. He had no mandate to say so. No other F.B.I. director had ever gone that far past a curt, official verdict of this kind. Some have suggested that he wanted to assure the world that he saw Hillary’s flawed judgment. WHY? There was no legal justification. There was no threat to the integrity of the F.B.I. There was only his ego, his self-centered presumptuous feeling. THAT FEELING SHOULD HAVE REMAINED PRIVATE.
Comey violated custom, protocol, and decency. His EGO required it. He put himself above the law. He put his ego above fairness.
Ten days before the election, having opened the laptop emails of Anthony Weiner and his wife, Hillary’s personal aide and adviser. Most of the emails there he and his team had already seen. There was nothing pertinent to his investigation of Hillary. Probably a day or two of examination would have corroborated the fact that no NEW details were there. Comey should have kept silent, until he had concluded the examination of those emails.
Instead, Comey sent a letter to Congress, expressing VAGUELY that there might PERHAPS be some new emails pertinent to the Hillary inquiry. He could have dismissed that possibility in a matter of hours or at most, according to experts, a day or two. There was no sound to an alarm.
Comey then announced that there was nothing new in those Weiner household emails. Never mind. We were excited for a minute, but all’s well now. The clearance came too late. The damage to Hillary had been done. The ALL CLEAR couldn’t clear the cloud away from the Hillary campaign.
Comey’s choices: To remain silent until he had drawn his conclusion. Instead, he sent the letter to Congress. Why? To pre-empt a possible leak to the public and to the press? A leak of WHAT?
Supposed he had not covered himself—as the letter was clearly meant to do—and the news of the investigation of another batch of emails did reach the public. It was Comey’s job to conduct his investigation IN PRIVATE. That’s the F.B.I rule—law?—protocol. The proper way to behave. ESPECIALLY IN AN ELECTION YEAR and SO CLOSE TO VOTING DAY.
Why did he do it? I submit that his MOTIVE COULD ONLY HAVE BEEN PERSONAL. I submit that his motive COULD ONLY HAVE BEEN out of his wish (DESIRE?) to influence the election. He could not have been unaware that the letter would do that. He could not have been unaware that the ONLY INFLUENCE WOULD HAVE BEEN TO AID TRUMP and harm Hillary. He should have known that NOT SENDING THE LETTER COULD NOT HAVE BEEN HELD AGAINST HIM, even if some new evidence surfaced later. He WAS NOT OBLIGATED TO ANNOUNCE POSSIBLE NEWFOUND INFRACTIONS. THAT was RECKLESS and IRRESPONSIBLE.
Why did he do it? It must, positively, without a shadow of a doubt, have BEEN A PERSONAL gesture to cause the Hillary campaign distress.
IT SIMPLY WAS NOT justified.
Even if more evidence had come out that could have justified a re-evaluation of Hillary’s culpability in using an unauthorized server, or of having endangered U.S Security, actions against Hillary would have continued.
Therefore: Hillary could not have avoided possible charges, so justice would not have been thwarted.
POEMS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
29 Rennie Court
POEMS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
When I step around the corner
Into the dark corridor
I swing round night
And I glance down the dim passage
To my left, every time.
I see the mail slot
In the small oval mirror before me,
And I hear my heavy treads
Upon the shedding mossy carpet.
It’s new and still emerging
As if its form is still being constituted
And as it becomes its cushiony self
It shuffles off excess in linty balls
And strands, wisps of matter,
Fringe particles, rubbed off existence.
In the vacuum cleaner bag a bale forms,
Reconstituted pale green fluff
Compacted into a cube of carpet
Contained in a plain brown wrapper.
The rug goes on. The rub does, too.
And I plod on, in barefeet
Lendl, Becker, Agassi
September 8, 1989
What is it about Lendel and Becker and Agassi? What is it about players so good they seem flawless and invincible? While we watch them we think we could do what they do, though. Don’t you? Sure. But that’s impossible, you think. But wait, wait, I could get that if I concentrated. That’s the trouble. I don’t pay attention on every point. I don’t always look at the ball. Dammit, I know I should look at the ball, at the ball, not where it’s going to go. Those guys always look at the ball, right? Well, not every time. They can just put the racquet in the neighborhood, at the spot, and the ball will hit just right and go over the net. It’ll just bounce exactly right off those strings and zip! But wait, those guys can do that because they’ve looked so many thousands of times, trillions, maybe, that their racquets know where to be. They got that good because they looked and looked and looked and now it’s not exactly automatic but it sure is reflexive and almost…instinctive. Could that be? It seems instinctive, but you know that holding a paddle with strings on it and reaching for a small flying globe and running and jumping within a confined space just to reach that speeding fuzzy yellow sphere, twisting your delicate knees and rotating your arms and scrunching up your fingers and wiping sweat out of your eyes and tugging your sopping shirt off your sticky shoulders and chest and bouncing up and down and swaying and sometimes even crashing to the ground, you just know, to tell the truth, that this can not be a matter of instinct. Practice is the point. Talent that is practiced, that is, is the cause.
And those guys want to win. They must want to win. We play for fun, right? Well, so do they. But the fun is the winning. To be a winner you have to practice every day. Every day. We can’t…won’t. But we don’t have the talent in the first place, so why bother? Because getting the ball over, just over the net, or rifling it down the line just past your opponent as he stumbles toward it off the wrong food because he thought you were going the other way with it, seeing the yellow blur kiss and skip off the green hard macadam just inside the white border line, teasingly low, as if it insidiously twisted itself a teeny bit to one side and then up under the back of his racquet, doing that all in a matter of two and a half seconds is a thrill. It’s a shot in the arm, a whiff of laughing gas, a ripple up your spring from a kiss you’ve longed for. It’s a rush of joy juice that makes you blush. It’s a feeling of invincibility. For that moment you are flawless. So that’s it. Lendl and Becker and Agassi are addicts, too, we who must watch these guys. They thrill us. They thrill us because they do what seems impossible. They thrill us because we share their thrills. They thrill us because we share their thrills. They thrill us because for a little while on each flawless point we feel as we watch, anyway, that we could do that. WE are addicted to their addiction, but without the aches and soreness and hangovers. Unless we think we are those guys. Unless we go out, the next morning, thinking we are that good and strain to do what they do. I won’t. It’s enough for me that they strain and win and let me watch. That’s what it is.
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Daniel J. Travanti
ENG 598
Spring 1976
Our distinguished author, who has made his reputation with previous works of travel, fable and adventure, here delivers us an admirable allegory which bravely combines the charms of all three in one narrative. The following is the notice prefixed to this noble work:
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative
Will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral
In it will be banished; persons attempting to find a
Plot in it will be shot.
This apparently caustic caution is representative of the humorous tint with which Mr. Twain, with the skill of a painter, washes his landscapes. He has the need to gainsay any moral in his tale, yet its entire trend is to draw in detail a lesson of the troubles a young man is to draw in detail a lesson of the troubles a young man is bound to encounter when he attempts to abandon the rules and regulations of a civilized and ordered life for the cavalier truancy of directionless adventure. The author’s humorous cast is calculated to disarm the reader, appealing to his softer nature while it colors harder truths.
Dealing entirely among the familiar scenes of life, the narrative brings to view characters which we see every day in nature. There is the central figure of the titled, who is always on the foreground, as in a Gainsborough portrait, living and moving against a backdrop of villages, river banks, fields and parlors. As our principal figure is simple, unstudied, and unadorned, so is his scenery. So is his speech, and each figure’s in turn, suited in simplicity to his station.
As Dr. Johnson observes of Shakespeare in his distinguished Preface, Mr. Twain suits his characters’ discourses to their humors. As our author here promises in his Explanatory following his Notice, “a number of dialects are used” and carry patterns of thought peculiar to the speakers alone. Such is the writer’s accuracy in observance of natural forms of speech that he causes us to feel his personages are men and women of flesh, each a true representative of a sort all readers have encountered in life. And the variety Mr. Twain achieves in his endeavor, from the most light-hearted portraits to pernicious drawings of ruffians and rascals, bespeaks a fertile imagination.
But though we find here passages of high emotion and detestable actions that threaten to horrify and tear asunder the passions of the reader, these are tempered by genuine touches of humor. Unlike those members of the common herd of novelists, Mr. Twain cares to appeal to our natural virtues, that clarify and help each reader understand better the true way that a light heart carries the good person. Through all of Huckleberry’s adversity, he remains loyal to his ebon friend Jim, demonstrating the stalwart camaraderie of a true friend. In a world seeking stability of thought and moderation in all things, our young adventurer shows himself capable of deep filial love, helping his less privileged companion to find a fuller and free life. It is a Christian duty of the highest rank to aid our oppressed brethren, and he who will go so far as to risk his own life and limb in the cause deserves the laurel. Jim is indeed a Noble Savage, who in his gentility and devotion to his protector proves the sublimity of the natural man. With exemplary tact, Mr. Twain, you have shown us the possibility of equality between two very disparate creatures of God, in a sometimes perilous, but ultimately benevolent world.
There is more to recommend this tale which, though simple in narration, is rich as a tapestry in thought. On the whole, I can confidently assure the curious reader of a satisfying adventure in its reading, which will bring satisfaction to his head; and, what is still better, to his heart.
Pandarus Failure
Daniel J. Travanti
English 623
Seminar in Medieval Literature
Fall, 1975
Pandarus’ Failure
Pandarus is charming, helpful, loyal and effective…for a time. He loves his niece and probably loves Troilus even more. But I have the feeling that he is motivated not entirely unselfishly. I shall show in this paper that Pandarus promotes and pursues Troilus and Criseyde’s affair partly out of frustration over his own unsuccessful pursuit of a lady.
When Pandarus offers his help, Troilus is amazed: “’This were a wonder thing,’ quod Troilus. / ‘Thow koudest nevere in love thiselven wisse! / How devel maistow brynge me to blisse?’” (I, 621-623) ¹ Pandarus does not deny the charge. In fact, he argues persuasively for the powers of an experienced, if unsuccessful, man:
“Ye, Troilus, now herke,” quod Pandare;
“Though I be nyce, it happeth often so,
That oon that excesse doth ful yvele fare
I have myself ek seyn a blynd man goo
Ther as he fel that couthe loken wide;
A fool may ek a wisman ofte gide.” (I, 624-630)
That is not only good and generous advice, it is a clear indication of how much Pandarus thinks about his own unhappy affair. And he doesn’t stop there. For three more stanzas he wails, and couches aphorisms at his own expense: “’A wheston is no kervying instrument, / But yet it maketh sharpe kervyng tolis.’” (I, 631-632); “’For how myghte evere swetnesse han be knowe / To him that nevere tasted biternesse?’” (I, 638-639). But his most persuasive argument is his last; and it applies to both men: “’Men seyn, ‘to wrecche is consolacioun / To have another felawe in his peyne.’’” (I, 708-709) So far, he has pledged his love to Troilus, and has offered not only his friendship and loyalty, but to help bear Troilus’ burden for him. But Pandarus would help Troilus obtain any woman at all, even his brother’s, Helen (I, 677), if he could. It seems to me that a man who would go that far is motivated by more than camaraderie. Pandarus seems desperate to help, operating largely out of the pain of his own unrequited love: “’So ful of sorwe am I, soth for to seyne, / That certainly namore harde grace / May sitte on me, for-why ther is no space.’” (I, 712-714)
There is the suggestion, over and over again, that Pandarus is trying to heal himself, or at least to be healed. In Book I he uses Phoebus, “that first fond art of medicyne” (659), as an example of one who could not help himself out of the pain of love; and at the end of the book the narrator speaks of “…an esy pacyent, the lore / Abit of hym that goth aboute his cure;” (1090-1091), meaning of Troilus. Earlier, Pandarus had revealed himself in as close a personal account of his own affair as the narrator ever gives us:
“Thow mayst allone here wepe and crye and knele,--
But love a woman that she wot it nought,
And she wol quyte it that thow shalt nat fele;
Unknowe, unkist, and lost, that is unsought.
What: many a man hath love ful deere ybought
Twenty wynter that his lady wiste,
That nevere yet his lady mouth he kiste.” (I, 806-812)
It is only a suggestion, but I can presume that Pandarus is anxious to have Troilus reveal himself partly because he, Pandarus, never did confess to his own lady. Indeed, Pandarus is still in the throes of that love:
That Pandarus, for al his wise speche,
Felt ek his part of loves shotes keene,
That, koude he nevere so wel of loving preche,
It made his hewe a-day ful ofte greene.
So shop it that hym fil that day a teene
In love, for which in wo to bedde he wente,
And made, er it was day, ful many a wente. (II, 57-63)
Despite his own pain, he pursues Troilus’ problem, and not out of uncommon generosity. It sounds as if Pandarus has accepted that if the great Apollo could not heal himself, neither could he solve his own problem. He seems to take his own advice now, about sharing his pain with another, in order to lessen it. And we feel that his passion to have Troilus and Criseyde couple will help him vicariously relieve his own frustration. (I’ve not gone into lechery and voyeurism as possible sub-motives, so to speak, because those subjects warrant separate and equally long consideration, for which I have no room here).
Pandarus plots an assignation and presses Troilus’ suit to Criseyde. Though it is a convention of the ritual of courtly love for the man to languish and fear literally dying, Pandarus seems to exaggerate Troilus’ condition. He does it to gain Criseyde’s sympathy, certainly, but Pandarus’ own pain shows though his pleading:
“Wo worth the faire gemme vertulees!
Wo worth that herbe also that dooth no boote!
Wo worth that beaute that is routheeles!
Wo worth that wight that tret ech undir foote!
Andye, that ben of beaute crop and roote,
If therwithal in yow ther be no routhe,
Than is it harm ye liven, by my trouthe!” (II, 344-350)
Pandarus might just as well be saying that to his own lady love! Though we do not know the details of his affair, we have enough information to see that these sentiments could apply to his own state. There is undeniable bitterness in lines 349 and 350, which could come only from experience. Considering that Pandarus’ plea is all for love, the remark seems a bit excessive and risky at this early stage. I can only think that it is his own pain that prompts it.
From the moment Pandarus instigates the tryst he is one with the lovers. He is in control of every detail:
“For he with gret deliberacioun
Hadde every thing that herto might availle
Forncast and put in execucioun,
And neither left for cost ne for travaile.” (III, 519-522)
His efforts are uncommonly strong, almost fanatical. Criseyde notices: “so wis he was, she was namore afered, -- / I mene, as fer as oughte ben required.” (III, 482-483) Pandarus is indeed inspired, and it is not only Troilus’ will, nor God’s alone that he implements. Criseyde sees a truth:
“Fox that ye ben! God yeve youre herte kare!
God help me so, ye caused al this fare,
Trowe I, “quod she, “for al youre words white.
O, whoso seeth yow, knoweth yow ful lite.” (III, 1565-1568)
While seeing to every detail, Pandarus stays almost embarrassingly close to both lovers:
“With that she gan hire face for to wrye
With the shete, and wax for shame al reed;
And Pandarus gan under for to prie,
And seyde, “Nece, if that I shal be ded,
Have here a swerd and smyteth of myn hed!
With that his arm al sodeynly he thriste
Under hire nekke, and at the laste hire kyste.” (III, 1569-1568)
He seems to move in unison with Troilus. He even helps him undress! “And of he rente al to his bare sherte;” (III. 1099). He attends to every need! “And with that word he for a quysshen ran, / And seyde, ‘Kneleth now, while that yow leste, / There God youre hertes brynge soone at reste!’” (III, 964-966) Pandarus’ own happiness depends on Troilus and Criseyde. He literally puts Criseyde into position for the next move in the trysting game, and rhapsodizes about the possibilities: “’For soone hope I we shul ben alle merye.’” (III, 952) There is no question that he is living vicariously, needing to repair, through his friends, a broken affair of his own. He stays close to the end: “And with that word he drow hym to the feere, / And took a light, and fond his contenaunce, / As for to looke upon an old romaunce.” (III, 978-980)
Throughout the rest of the affair, Pandarus experiences every emotion lovers feel. He hurts, hopes, cheers and makes excuses to help. He has been effective, no doubt, and Troilus is grateful. And Pandarus seems pleased with his own efforts. But when Criseyde is exchanged for Antenor and Troilus plunges into despair, Pandarus cannot hold back his previously private self-interest:
“But telle me this, whi thow art now so mad
To sorwen thus? Whi listow in this wise,
Syn thi desir al holly hastow had,
So that, by right, it oughte ynough suffise?
But I, that nevere felt in my servyse
A friendly cheere, or lokyng of an eye,
Lat me thus wepe and wailen til I deye.” (IV, 393-399)
Suddenly it is his pain that matters. And just as suddenly, Pandarus is ready to have Troilus abandon Criseyde: “If she be lost, we shal recovere an other.” (IV, 406) For a man who cares deeply about his niece and loves these two people specifically, Pandarus is startingly objective about Troilus’ predicament! I can only believe that Pandarus wants above all to have Troilus have someone, anyone, and to realize a relationship, any relationship—to help satisfy Pandarus’ own longing for fulfillment.
His final flurries of reassuring words and frantic activity avail Pandarus nothing. The lovers are doomed, and Troilus’ sadness is complete. So is Pandarus’ grief. In his last scene he is at first silent, unable or unwilling to speak. But at last he must: “’What sholde I seyen? I hate, ywys, Cryseyde; / And, God woot, I wol hate hire evermore!’” (V, 1732-1733) There is a note of reluctance in these harsh words that reveals Pandarus’ personal pain. He knows that such a hateful sentiment cannot help Troilus, yet he cannot resist speaking it. He has failed in his personal suit, and circumstances have destroyed this surrogate relationship despite his best efforts. His last words are indeed “the last almighty God I preye / Delivere hire soon! I kan namore seye.’” (V, 1742-1743) And may Pandarus soon be delivered from his pain.
Orphans in Search of Understanding
In “The Zoo Story”, Jerry is trying to communicate with another human being. He has reached a point in his life where words as conveyors of thoughts alone are no longer effective. He must use words now to affect Peter emotionally. He’s not looking for acceptance, however; it’s understanding he needs. If Jerry can convey to Peter his agony of separation and loneliness, he will have succeeded and is willing to die for the achievement. Todd Andrews, in The Floating Opera, wants to communicate his lack of feeling. He has succeeded so well in donning masks along the way whenever his emotions threatened to overwhelm him, that he is terrified of having totally isolated himself. He is de-sensitized to the point of despair. Like Jerry, he thinks he would rather die now than face a lonely and uncertain future. He pursues a written “Inquiry” for years, in an attempt to understand the meaning of his father’s suicide and the reasons for their “imperfect communication” all of Todd’s life. If he can uncover the reasons, he feels, he may want to go on living. Better than that, if he can make us understand too, he may feel confident enough to rejoin the human race. He writes his book to us in an effort to make contact in a way he never could before. Quentin, in Act II of “After the Fall,” laments: “It made me wonder why I seem so unable to mourn. So disconnected.” It’s his mother’s death that fails to move him at that moment. He feels the same detachment when Maggie commits suicide. He is shut down emotionally; isolated in his mind. And like Jerry and Todd, he is struggling to correspond with the rest of the world.
Somewhere in his life, each of these men has been made to feel abandoned, so each one has repressed his sensibilities along the way for fear of being rejected again. Two choose life in the end; one opts for death. I care enough to examine why and meaning of their choices. Jerry has two empty picture frames in his room. He tells the sordid story of his parents’ deaths and says that is why “good old Mom and good old Dad are frameless.” But he suggests that Peter (and we) can perhaps see deeper meaning in the empty frames. He’s hinting, but he’s afraid. He reveals himself, however, when he allows: “I have no feeling about any of it that I care to admit to myself.” It’s an admission of a refusal to face reality. Or is it that he cannot bear to face the truth? Obviously, Jerry has been deeply hurt and suppressed the pain.
For Todd Andrews, the turning point from mere skepticism to hard cynicism came on the day he found his father hanged in the basement. That was the beginning of his inquiry into the meaning of communication in personal relationships and the onset of his despair. When Quentin was a boy, his parents tricked him by sending him out for a walk and then leaving him behind while they went on vacation. When they returned with presents and an apology, the boy refused to be comforted. There is even a suggestion, in Act II, that he tried to kill himself because of the pain of that rejection. Later, when his mother dies, Quentin cannot weep. And when Maggie threatens suicide, he reacts defensively: “It isn’t my love you want any more. It’s my destruction! But you’re not going to kill me, Maggie!” (end Act II).
Jerry’s parents were self-destructive and died recklessly. He went to live with his aunt and she “dropped dead” on the day of his high school graduation. He buries his heart; Todd dons his third mask, of cynicism, to hide his feelings from himself; and Quentin will try to mold his world to his own emotional specifications. Death could be called the supreme betrayal and suicide can seem to be the ultimate treachery; the final rejection. It’s enough to prevent some from ever committing their hearts again.
Jerry says that he has tried to communicate with the tenants in his building. But has he? When he is young, he has a homosexual encounter that leaves him doubting his masculinity. He tries to love women and does, in each case “For about an hour.” He trusts no one, claims his landlady spies on him, sneaks in and out avoiding his neighbors, and finally goes on a campaign to make meaningful contact with the landlady’s dog. Jerry tells us that he went to the zoo “to find out more about the way people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other, and with people too.” He is not surprised to find a perfect parallel between his building and the animal quarters in the zoo: “It probably wasn’t a fair test…But, if it’s a zoo, that’s the way it is.” The animals are indifferent to each other in their cages, and people ignore each other in the world. Jerry longs to break out of his emotional cage, to touch another human being.
“He learned from his experience with the dog
That neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion.”
He applies the technique to Peter, first by appealing to his kindness, then to his baser instincts: “You’re a vegetable: Go lie down on the ground.” He demands Peter’s place on the bench, and there follows a primitive battle. The victory is Jerry’s, as Peter is reduced from cool, rational, ordered, and vapid man to an angry, sweating, aggressive and more animalistic being. Peter directly experiences Jerry’s hostility and confusion, and ultimately, after the killing, I am sure the same frustration and loneliness. Because Peter feels what Jerry has felt, Peter understands, and what’s more, will carry the message of Jerry’s agony to others.
Todd Andrews writes his message directly, in bitterness and irony, but with floating humor. At the beginning of his story, he is convinced that suicide is the only solution to his problem. He is not unlike Jerry in that respect, except that he must intellectualize his pain, to try to find answers that he can verbalize. He reasons too much, perhaps which is what keeps him isolated emotionally. He explains at the end of chapter XV: “Things that are clear to me are sometimes incomprehensible to others—which fact occasions this chapter, if not the whole book.” Not that Todd was always more cerebral than visceral. Once in that foxhole in the Argonne, he had felt “intense intimacy” and “the purest and strongest emotion” he had ever experienced (Ch. VII).
It was with the German soldier who had become a companion in the confusion of hand-to-hand combat. He was emotional, personal, and even intimate with the man, but finally doubt and fear drove him to bayonet the soldier. From then on, Todd could not regard people as higher beings. In fact, he would never again be able “to oppose the terms man and animal” nor “to regard their accomplishments except as the tricks of more or less well-trained beasts.” If a man can understand his own emotions, he has a chance of understanding his existence. Todd’s problem becomes his inability to feel freely; to be involved emotionally. Perhaps he would like to recapture what he had for a short time in that foxhole: “For the space of some hours we had been one man, had understood each other beyond friendship, beyond love, as a wise man understands himself.” He had found himself there and left himself behind. It’s not surprising, then, that when he discovers his father’s body hanging in the basement, Todd remains objective. He is aware above all that Dad’s hair is neatly combed and there is “not a smudge of dirt anywhere on him.” That day marks the beginning of his reasoned inquiry, a cool and lifeless exploration of the ultimately vital and burning question: ‘What is the value of life?’
Todd never finds the answer. His father’s death was meaningless, therefore “Nothing has intrinsic value” (Ch. XXV) and no one and nothing is to be trusted. From the day of his mother’s death, Quentin has had a similar problem. Remembering their desertion of him when he was a boy, he muses: “I see, yes—to break through, to truth” (Act II). He trusts no one, not even himself. He is unfaithful to his first wife, confesses, and then never hears the end of it: “Maybe I don’t speak because the one time I did tell you my feelings you didn’t get over it for six months” (Act I). He has never really communicated with her: “Quentin, you think reading a brief to a woman is talking to her?” (Act I). She is painfully aware of his inability to relate, and pinpoints one barrier: “But I think now that you don’t really see any woman. Except in some ways your mother.” (Act I). Later when he marries Maggie, he knows he is wanting her for the wrong reasons. He thought he could change her and strives for the power “To transform somebody—to save!” (Act II). And toward the end of their relationship, he weeps: “Maggie, we…used one another!” (Act II). At least he is trying. “Maggie, a human being has to forgive himself! Neither of us is innocent!” (Act II). Nothing is certain, but we can choose to live with doubt, at least wanting to, if not being able to love: “And I wanted to face the worst thing I could imagine—that I could not love” (Act II). Acceptance is the answer for Quentin: “To know, and even happily, that we meet unblessed.”…but that we can forgive each other our worst faults.
Three lonely men. Three orphans. Three people incapable of loving, but trying to understand and to be understood. Jerry’s plight seems hopeless. His is a crusading self-destruction that spreads its own news. At least he’s made contact. Todd is self-centered enough to want to publish his purpose. He leaves us with a sense of futility, a ‘What’s-the-use?’ attitude that will keep him alive, but hardly living. Quentin may be fine. He’s faced his guilt and separateness and confessed to those closest to him, which proves that he cares to try to work out his dilemma instead of to run from it. He enlists our sympathy, but he does not beg pity. It’s mutual understanding he craves, and with Holga, he has a chance.