winnie's human
alone in the wilderness
[S]now was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.
Whenever I see soft snow like this, I’m reminded of what is possibly the finest short story ever written: The Dead, by James Joyce. It’s the story of a man and his wife, Gabriel and Gretta Conway, who are attending a rather formal party in the winter of 1904. Over the course of the evening Gabriel, who is rather full of himself, comes to recognize how shallow he is. That night he learns from his wife that when she was young she had an admirer…a boy of seventeen years, a laborer in the gasworks named Michael Furey…whose unrequited love for her was so great that he left his sickbed to stand vigil outside her window the night before she was to leave town. He stood there the long night through, this boy from the gasworks, in the cold Irish rain, and died within the week. Gabriel Conway realizes he will never love his wife or any woman with the same passion as Michael Furey. He stands at the window after his wife has fallen asleep, he stands inside where it’s warm and looks out on the dark night and watches the snow fall.
It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
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