Sunday, April 25, 2010

Tempus fugit

"And then suddenly, the receiver pressed to my ear, another even more inert silence filled the optic lines connecting us.  And I had the sharpest pain that Ann was going to die, not in Haddam and not immediately, not even soon, but not so long from then either--at the end of a period of time that, because she was abandoning me for the arms of another, would pass almost imperceptibly, her life's extinguishment paying out beyond my knowing. . . ."

Frank Bascombe in Richard Ford's Independence Day:  a novel (Boston:  Little, Brown and Company (Canada) Limited, 1995), 102.