“It’s just that she feels so fragile yet. It’s something you and I can’t understand.”
What Joyce should have understood, and at that moment, was something that Jon himself was probably not even close to knowing. The word “fragile” should have warned her. Not a word Jon often used. Not a word you would expect to hear, in connection with Edie. He was falling in love.
Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping-under. But you can think of it as speeded up, to a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love. Tick. Now he is. There was no way it could be seen as probable, or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a healthy man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.
from Alice Munro’s story “Fiction,” published in Harper’s in August ‘07 and now part of Munro’s collection Too Much Happiness
Munro really gets at something in those few paragraphs, really sees through to the core of how lives flow sometimes. I heard this passage this morning while walking my dog along streets made emptier by hangovers. An audiobook. And a good one. Nice reading by someone named Kimberly Farr. I’d post a link and try to get my little commission from audible.com, but I don’t feel right doing that until I’m finished with a book or audiobook and know for certain that I can recommend the whole thing.
“Wenlock Edge,” another story from the collection that I just finished listening to, is available here for free from The New Yorker.
