A Final Hesitation

"It is nothing to keep my peace? To keep silent is simple? No, it is not simple. There is a silence that lies and my lie, and my fraud, and my unworthiness, and my cowardice, and my treachery, and my crime, I would have drunk drop by drop, I would have spit it out, then drunk again, I would have finished at midnight and begun again at noon, and my 'good morning' would have lied, and my 'good night,' too, and I would have slept on it, and eaten it with my bread, and I would have looked Cosette in the face, and answered the smile of the angel with the smile of the damned, and I would have been a detestable imposter! What for? To be happy. To be happy, I! Have I any right to be happy? I am outside of life, monsieur."

- Jean Valjean (V.7.i)

Day Count: 153

Page Count: 1428

I stand at a threshold of a new achievement - with only 98% of the novel finished, I am decidedly a day away from completing Les Miserables. By the end of this week, that is to say, two days into the month of June, I will have finished an endeavor that I began at the first of this year. It's an exciting time, to say the least.

Still, I find myself confronted with a feeling I've not felt since I finished War & Peace last May. There is, welling up within me, a hesitation - something that holds me in a sort of suspended animation. Almost limbo. I don't want it to end. As the novel winds down, the former convict Jean Valjean reveals his true identity to Marius, who has married Cosette. After this realization Valjean begins to distance himself from the couple so as not to taint their happiness with his depravity (the discussion of which precipitated the quote that started this post).

As Valjean works to distance himself from Cosette, I find myself irrevocably drawn closer to him. As the pages to complete dwindles, I find that I can't bring myself to close that gap. I will miss these characters and I will miss that world. Tomorrow, I will post some concluding thoughts about the world of Les Miserables, but for now, I just want to revel in this brief moment of hesitation and expectation. It's quite the place to be...

Until next time...