Palmerino by Melissa Pritchard

Author:Melissa Pritchard [Pritchard, Melissa]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781934137697
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Mary and Vernon spend four days in Venice. While Mary does research for her new book of poems, Vernon, wandering the canals, happens upon the funeral ceremony of a Venetian girl and is moved enough by the experience to write an essay, “The Bead-Threader’s Funeral and the Church of the Greeks.” Over dinner at the hotel that night, she reads aloud to Mary from the section closest to the end.

“The poor little consumptive maker of bead garlands for cemeteries is indeed now—save, perhaps, for her mother—of as little importance as the dead kitten bobbing up and down, a sleek, grey ball, in the green waters of her native canal. But that just answers to the truth. The poor (let us have courage to say it) leave no trace behind, and are in this respect less of a fraud than the rich, who possess ancestors with names, and for their bones, inscriptions and what the French call concessions à perpétuité—to wit, their measure of earth properly paid for all eternity. There is wonderfully little lux perpetua for any of us; and the poor are too busy and have too little house-room for each individual’s addition to the common fund of life, the crowd of living beings, the group of surviving thoughts and emotions, to be labeled with an individual memory. This does not prevent little makers of glass-bead garlands, even when they die of consumption at nineteen, from having played their part—perhaps been happy and made others happy (some nice, clean young fellow like the one who pulled off his red cassock to take an oar)—and being glad that they too will have a funeral service with married friends in black, girl friends in white, wax dips, and fine Latin words promising some vague glory which is, after all, this.”

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