Bear by Marian Engel

Bear by Marian Engel

Author:Marian Engel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 14

She was given to crises of faith. That evening, after Homer left, she sat up in Colonel Cary’s admirable study, surely one of the great rooms of the world in terms of adaptation to purpose, unable to read or to settle to cataloguing.She wondered by what right she was there, and why she did what she did for a living. And who she was. Usually these quandaries arose weeks after the beginning of an absorbing assignment, but this one had set in early, just after she had established her working patterns. She understood technically and even emotionally the need to redefine objectives, but she could not understand why the period of redefinition had to be accompanied by depression,an existential screaming inside herself, and a raucous interior voice that questioned not the project she was working on, but her own self.“What am I doing here?” she would ask herself, and the interior voice would echo, “Who the hell do you think you are, having the nerve to be here?“She had been drinking beer. Her head ached and spun. She also felt guilty, as if she had revealed to Homer some secret which was not hers to reveal.if she had done something bad, and he knew. She tried to concentrate on externals,on her cards, on her notes. She looked around at the bookshelves and realized that in order to make the job last the summer she would have to cheat. There wasn’t an efficient week’s work left. She could go soon; she did not want to go. She always attempted to be orderly, to catalogue her thoughts and feelings, so that when the awful, anarchic inner voice caught her out, her mind was stocked with efficacious replies. “What am I doing here?“could be answered with lists. She had another stock of replies to”Who the hell do you think you are, attempting to be alive?” She justified herself by saying that she was of service, that she ordered fragments of other lives.Here, however, she could not justify herself.What was the use of all these cards and details and orderings? In the beginning they had seemed beautiful, capable of making an order of their own, capable of being in the end filed and sorted so that she could find a structure, plumb a secret. Now, they filled her with guilt; she felt there would never, ever, be anything as revealing and vivid as Homer’s story, or as relevant. They were a heresy against the real truth. You could take any life and shuffle it on cards, she thought bitterly, lay it out in a pyramid solitaire, and it would have a kind of meaning; but you could never make a file card that said, “Campbell,Homer” convey any of the meaning that Homer had conveyed tonight. She would soon have to admit that up here she was term-serving, putting in time until she died. Colonel Cary was surely one of the great irrelevancies of Canadian history and she was another.Neither of them was connected to anything.



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