From whose bourn no traveller returns
Hamlet. 3, i.
An especially cruel blow, the second. Already there were the grievous losses from a continuing world war. And now in 1918, this deadly influenza pandemic. What would be the cumulative effect on a suffering and fearful world? What might be the effect on the soul, in particular of a sensitive and thoughtful person?
II.
Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" begins with a young woman, Miranda, dreaming about running from Death. "His pale face smiled in an evil trance, he did not glance at her." <1>
The dream ends. Awake, the facts and tropes of death restate and persist.
In explaining how Miranda feels about people sitting on her office desk, Porter describes their eyes "roving"; how Miranda's thoughts "roved hazily"; and much later, that Miranda's "memory turned and roved after another place". To rove is to wander, to drift, to roam. Such a roving may connote the attenuation of something. Or from. There are, too, certain Liberty Bond representatives, "cawing back and forth over [Miranda's] head". Crows are said to caw. And one type of crow is the carrion.
Miranda's gentleman friend is a young soldier, Adam Barclay. She attends a play with Adam, where Miranda is beset with a "deep tremor", forcing a resistance to self "as if she were closing windows and doors...against a rising storm." A specific foreshadowing is to Miranda contracting, and almost dying, from the influenza.
Taken to hospital, Miranda becomes delirious, and falls further and further away from the living. "[T]o keep her small hold on the life of human beings...between her and the receding world." As that hold slips, Porter's artistry ascends. "[A]nd there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being...this fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction". The passage concludes with a moving assertiveness. "Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay."
III.
Miranda lives. Her soul bears the intimations. Katherine Anne Porter proposes and elaborates most acutely, in the brilliant and haunting "Pale Horse, Pale Rider".
__________
<1>Porter, Katherine Anne. "Pale Horse, Pale Rider". The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. Jonathan Cape, 1967.
Miranda's gentleman friend is a young soldier, Adam Barclay. She attends a play with Adam, where Miranda is beset with a "deep tremor", forcing a resistance to self "as if she were closing windows and doors...against a rising storm." A specific foreshadowing is to Miranda contracting, and almost dying, from the influenza.
Taken to hospital, Miranda becomes delirious, and falls further and further away from the living. "[T]o keep her small hold on the life of human beings...between her and the receding world." As that hold slips, Porter's artistry ascends. "[A]nd there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being...this fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction". The passage concludes with a moving assertiveness. "Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay."
III.
Miranda lives. Her soul bears the intimations. Katherine Anne Porter proposes and elaborates most acutely, in the brilliant and haunting "Pale Horse, Pale Rider".
__________
<1>Porter, Katherine Anne. "Pale Horse, Pale Rider". The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. Jonathan Cape, 1967.
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