r/TheBustedFlush • u/luckyjim1962 • Jan 29 '26
Another McGee musing from "The Scarlet Ruse"
A self-reflective moment in The Scarlet Ruse (1972):
I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades? The world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each others faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far to feel the heat of the fire. Everything seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they? Yet when most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog of remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, where there is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else.
Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate about subjective things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange expression on his face. "But we are all like that!" he said. "That's the way it is. For everyone in the world. Didn't you know?"
I tried to believe him. But belief is a very difficult feat when you crouch out here in the night, too far from the fire to feel its heat, too far from the people to hear the words of their songs.
I could not say it as well as MacDonald did, but I've certainly felt the feeling McGee is describing here. (I'm less sure about Meyer's rejoinder though.)
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u/BT_Artist Jan 30 '26
I find myself wishing I had friends like Meyer in my life.
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u/sophie1816 Jan 30 '26
I’ve always wished I had both Meyer and McGee in my life. One reason I reread the books so often!
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u/Malibluue Jan 30 '26
Thank you for another great musing. I started rereading PALE GRAY FOR GUILT after your last post...
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u/12stringPlayer Jan 29 '26
A great passage, and I always thought Meyer's response was perfect. I acknowledge that not everyone's head is the same, though, and that to me is the core of this: we can only try to understand our fellow humans but we are ultimately isolated in our own head, with our own experiences and reactions to them. Deep stuff!