The Sheila Variations

The Books: "Emily's Quest" (L.M. Montgomery)

Next book on the shelf ...

Emily's Quest - by L.M. Montgomery

This excerpt is near the end of the book - and it is some of my favorite prose of Lucy Maud's ever. It's practically elegiac. We're about 3 pages from the end of the novel here - and it feels like it will end this way. Which - I still remember my sensation the first time I read this book. I read it - and I read about the wedding that never was - and I was SHOCKED and yet somehow unbelievably thrilled, too - like: maybe now? Maybe now Emily's loneliness will end? Maybe now Emily and Teddy can say what needs to be said? FINALLY?? But then came this section and then came the chilling words: "Year after year ..." and I just remember finding it so unutterably sad when I first read it. And I still do ... but now that I know the ending ... the sadness doesn't feel quite so intense. Because I know that she will get a break soon. There will be a respite. To quote the Little River Band, help is on its way. But dammit, help doesn't arrive until the last damn page ... thanks for putting me through the wringer, Lucy Maud!

To me, this section proves that those who blithely say, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" are full of shit. Or, to be kinder - they are not fully thinking about what they are saying. They either think that that cliche is true ... or they do not know what to say, and that cliche seems to fit the bill. So I would respond to someone who made the mistake of saying that to me with: "Try it." (stealing a line from Men in Black). TRY it before you say that to me. If you can say that - and if you can say that so easily - then it says to me 2 things. 1. We are not the same kind of person. Maybe for SOME people it is "better to have loved and lost" blah blah ... but this is not true for EVERYBODY. And #2, which is meaner: it says to me that you do not know what you are talking about, and frankly, nobody likes someone who blabbers on as though they are an expert in a subject they know nothing about. If I sound angry, then it's because I am. I mean, not really right now - but anyone who has suffered a loss of any kind will know what I'm talking about. The stupid shit that people say to you. Now, yes, yes, people are well-meaning, people say things because they don't know what to say, people rely on cliche to get their point across - and I have cut these people slack for many years. Thank God this is my blog and I don't have to cut anyone slack here. I can take a break here from having to be a good sport, and nice, and polite.

Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all my ASS.

And finally - this section moves me so much because of Emily's continuing commitment to her love for Teddy. Or - bah - that's a horrible way to say it. It's all in the last paragraph of the excerpt - which still, after reading it so many times, over so many years, brings me to tears. I don't really write in the margins of novels (I do in all my non-fiction books - I bracket stuff, write question marks, underline ... but not in novels or fiction.) but at some point in my life - I put a bracket around that last paragraph. It obviously means a lot to me. It helped me to make sense of what I was doing in my own life ... after I had loved and lost. And no - the cavalry did not run in on the very last page to save me. Help was NOT on its way in my case. But still: the sentiment expressed there, while very difficult, is something dear to my heart.

Many people who get rejected - or not even rejected - who just have things not work out - then turn that into anger and bitterness towards the one who did the rejecting. I call them the "Love/Hate People". As in: "You love me? Oh, I love you too! Oh - now you hate me? Then I hate you too!" You see it all the time. Love turned to hate. This kind of switch-over doesn't really work for me, even though I've been rejected and even though ... sometimes it's even warranted! Like with this dude. If anyone deserves to be scorned and hated by Sheila, it's that dude. But ... I just can't do it. I'm not carrying a torch for him or anything ... it's just that I can't HATE him ... I can't suddenly think he's a bad person, just because he acted like an ass. He's not a bad person. And I can't help but WISH HIM WELL. And his response to me - on that hot sidewalk - as I wished him well - tells me that he was expecting me to be yet another Love/Hate Person. He was baffled by my good will towards him. But I just ... sometimes I have WISHED that I was a Love/Hate Person. That I could just switch off the love - when someone disses me - or hurts me - that I could say, "Okay then - FUCK. YOU." And then I would get to be all pissed and self-righteous. But I can't do that. Sometimes I should, believe me, sometimes I should.

But it's the sentiment in that last paragraph below ...

I guess it's one of my ... credos, maybe you'd call it. I believe in love like that. I really do. Invisible ... not recognized by the rest of the world ... and yet real.

This'll be the last excerpt of the Emily books. sniff, sniff. We will move on to yet another Lucy Maud book after this one - but I have SO enjoyed hanging out with all the Emily fans over these past couple weeks. It's been a total joy.

Excerpt from Emily's Quest - by L.M. Montgomery

II

That summer was a hard time for Emily. The very anguish of her suffering had filled life and now that it was over she realised its emptiness. Then, too, to go anywhere meant martyrdom. Every one talking about the wedding, asking, wondering, surmising. But at last the wild gossip and clatter over Ilse's kididoes had finally died away and people found something else to talk about. Emily was left alone.

Alone? Ay, that was it. Always alone. Love -- friendship gone forever. Nothing left but ambition. Emily settled herself resolutely down to work. Life ran again in its old accustomed grooves. Year after year the seasons walked by her door. Violet-sprinkled valleys of spring - blossom-script of summer - minstrel-firs of autumn - pale fires of the Milky Way on winter nights - soft, new-mooned skies of April - gnomish beauty of dark Lomardies against a moonrise - deep of sea calling to deep of wind - lonely yellow leaves falling in October dusks - woven moonlight in the orchard. Oh, there was beauty in life still - always would be. Immortal, indestructible beauty beyond all the stain and blur of mortal passion. She had some very glorious hours of inspiration and achievement. But mere beauty which had once satisfied her soul could not wholly satisfy it now. New Moon was unchanged, undisturbed by the changes that came elsewhere. Mrs. Kent had gone to live with Teddy. The old Tansy Patch was sold to some Halifax man for a summer home. Perry went to Montreal one autumn and brought Ilse back with him. They were living happily in Charlottetown, where Emily often visited them, astutely evading the matrimonial traps Ilse was always setting for her. It was becoming an accepted thing in the clan that Emily would not marry.

"Another old maid at New Moon," as Uncle Wallace said gracefully.

"And to think of all the men she might have had," said Aunt Elizabeth bitterly. "My Wallace -- Aylmer Vincent - Andrew -"

"But if she didn't -- love -- them," faltered Aunt Laura.

"Laura, you need not be indelicate."

Old Kelly, who still went his rounds -- "and will till the crack of doom," declared Ilse -- had quite given up teasing Emily about getting married, though he occasionally made regretful, cryptic allusions to "toad ointment". There was none of his significant nods and winks. Instead, he always gravely asked her what book she did be working on now, and drove off shaking his spiky grey head. "What do the men be thinking of, anyway? Get up, my nag, get up."

Some men were still thinking of Emily, it appeared. Andrew, now a brisk youn widower, would have come back at the beck of a finger Emily never lifted. Graham Mitchell, of Shrewsbury, unmistakably had intentions. Emily wouldn't have him because he had a slight cast in one eye. At least, that was what the Murrays supposed. They could think of no other reason for her refusal of so good a match. Shrewsbury people declared that he figured in her next novel and that she had only been "leading him on" to "get material". A reputed Klondike "millionaire" pursued her for a winter, but disappeared as briefly in the spring.

"Since she has published those books she thinks no one good enough for her," said Blair Water folks.

Aunt Elizabeth did not regret the Klondike man - he was only a Derry Pond Butterworth, to begin with, and what were the Butterworths? Aunt Elizabeth always contrived to give the impression that Butterworths did not exist. They might imagine they did, but the Murrays k new better. But she did not see why Emily could not take Mooresby, of the firm of Mooresby and Parker, Charlottetown. Emily's explanation that Mr. Mooresby could never live down the fact that he had once had his picture in the papers as a Perkins' Food Baby struck Aunt Elizabeth as very inadequate. But Aunt Elizabeth at last admitted that she could not understand the younger generation.

III

Of Teddy Emily never heard, save from occasional items in newspapers which represented him as advancing steadily in his career. He was beginning to have an international reputation as a portrait painter. The old days of magazine illustrations were gone and Emily was never now confronted with her own face - or her own smile - or her own eyes - looking out at her from some casual page.

One winter Mrs. Kent died. Before her death she sent Emily a brief note - the only word Emily had ever had from her.

"I am dying. When I am dead, Emily, tell Teddy about the letter. I've tried to tell him, but I couldn't tell my son I had done that. Tell him for me."

Emily smiled sadly as she put the letter away. It was too late to tell Teddy. He had long since ceased to care for her. And she -- she would love him forever. And even though he knew it not, surely such love would hover around him all his life like an invisible benediction, not understood but dimly felt, guarding him from ill and keeping from him all things of harm and evil.

Posted by sheila