One Writes of Scars. . .

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

Tender is the Night

 "After three-quarters of an hour of standing around, he became suddenly involved in a human contact. It was just the sort of thing that was likely to happen to him when he was in the mood of not wanting to see any one. So rigidly did he sometimes guard his exposed self-consciousness that frequently he defeated his own purposes; as an actor who underplays a part sets up a craning forward, a stimulated emotional attention in an audience, and seems to create in others an ability to bridge the gap he has left open. Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity — we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.

So Dick might, himself, have analyzed the incident that ensued. As he paced the Rue des Saintes-Anges he was spoken to by a thin-faced American, perhaps thirty, with an air of being scarred and a slight but sinister smile. As Dick gave him the light he requested, he placed him as one of a type of which he had been conscious since early youth — a type that loafed about tobacco stores with one elbow on the counter and watched, through heaven knew what small chink of the mind, the people who came in and out. Intimate to garages, where he had vague business conducted in undertones, to barber shops, to the lobbies of theatres — in such places, at any rate, Dick placed him. Sometimes the face bobbed up in one of Tad’s more savage cartoons — in boyhood Dick had often thrown an uneasy glance at the dim borderland of crime on which he stood."

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night, 1934

MEMO

"The previous week had left me drained. I had gone back to the town of my early years in a way I could never have imagined -- to see my father laid to rest. Now there would be no way to say what I was never capable of saying before. Growing up, the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable -- nothing but the sound of voices, colorless unnatural speech. My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking had said, "Isn't an artist a fellow who paints?" when told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist. It seemed I' always been chasing after something, anything that moved -- a car, a bird, a blowing leaf -- anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.

When I left home, I was like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic. I'd done that and I'd been to the ends of the earth -- to the water's edge -- and now I was back in Spain, back where it all started, in the court of the Queen with a half-glazed expression on my face, with even the wisp of a beard. "What's with the decoration?" one of the neighbors who had come to pay their respects said, pointing to my face. In the short time I was there, it all came back to me, all the flimflam, the older order of things, the Simple Simons -- but something else did, too -- that my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me."

Chronicles Volume I

sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred

"The anger and the emptiness and the hate that had come with the let-down after the bridge, when he had looked from where he had lain and crouching, seen Anselmo dead, were still all through him. In him, too, was despair from the sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred in order that they may continue to be soldiers. Now it was over he was lonely, detached and unrelated and hated every one he saw."

For Whom the Bell Tolls