“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”
This passage forms part of the final stages of Toni Morrrison’s novel Beloved. Here she finds a visceral, animated language to talk about the unfinished ‘fate’ of her character Beloved, the child killed rather than be taken into slavery; a child who returns to haunt her mother and sister because she cannot accept her own death and her mother’s terrible role in her murder.
The animation of loneliness and the escalating contrast between one form of loneliness and another is deeply moving. Morrison finds a language for grief that is both visceral and transcendent; present and yet elsewhere.
The past is only ever finished, never finished with.
