.. desperate fingers; closing, to feel the final
luke-warm fragment of life glide neatly and softly into forgetfulness.
XIII
I SAY GOOD-BYE TO LA MISERE
To convince the reader that this history is mere fiction (and rather
vulgarly violent fiction at that) nothing perhaps is needed save that
ancient standby of sob-story writers and thrill-artists alike--the Happy
Ending. As a matter of fact, it makes not the smallest difference to me
whether anyone who has thus far participated in my travels does or does
not believe that they and I are (as that mysterious animal, "the public"
would say) "real." I do, however, very strenuously object to the
assumption, on the part of anyone, that the heading of this, my final,
chapter stands for anything in the nature of happiness. In the course of
recalling (in God knows a rather clumsy and perfectly inadequate way)
what happened to me between the latter part of August, 1917, and the
first of January, 1918, I have proved to my own satisfaction (if not to
anyone else's) that I was happier in La Ferte Mace, with The Delectable
Mountains about me, than the very keenest words can pretend to express. I
daresay it all comes down to a definition of happiness. And a definition
of happiness I most certainly do not intend to attempt; but I can and
will say this: to leave La Misere with the knowledge, and worse than that
the feeling, that some of the finest people in the world are doomed to
remain prisoners thereof for no one knows how long--are doomed to
continue, possibly for years and tens of years and all the years which
terribly are between them and their deaths, the grey and indivisible
Non-existence which without apology you are quitting for Reality--cannot
by any stretch of the imagination be conceived as constituting a Happy
Ending to a great and personal adventure.
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