The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (June 15-18, 2004)
The Glimpses of the Moon tells the story of Nick and Susy Lansing, a poor couple who survived using their social connections to live the life of privilege. The beginning of the novel explains their motivations for getting married. It is an experiment that will make them both a novelty, and they realize that they will receive honeymoon cheques and offers of homes to visit and live at. Susy believes that she and Nick will at least be able to manage for one year. After the year is up, both agree that if they find better opportunities alone, they would not have to stay together. In the meantime, they agree to help one another get ahead.
The one problem is that both must make ethical compromises in accepting favors. Susy is disgusted when she helps a friend have an affair in secret by mailing pre-written letters to her husband at designated intervals. When Nick learns what she has done to maintain their security, he is disgusted and leaves her. While both are disgusted by money, they still need it for their survival. Both hate the concessions they make and the personalities they deal with while using these same hated connections to further themselves. When Nick leaves, he promises to write in a couple of days which extend to months after he leaves on a cruise with rich friends. Susy is left to her own devices and accepts a marriage proposal of an old friend who's come into great wealth.
While Nick and Susy honestly love one another, they realize how much they individually care too late. The survival games they both play are not satisfying when they're played only for themselves and not as a team. Both characters grow with the absence of the other, and remember their prized time together, but neither knows how to communicate with the other, especially as more time passes. Both believe the other has moved on and is better without his/her. Whether Susy and Nick manage to connect once more is one of the main themes of the novel. As with Edith Wharton's other novels, The Glimpses of the Moon, delves into compromises individuals make to succeed and how far misinterpretations of minor events can take a person from their true desires in life.
Favorite Quotes:
Susy laughed impatiently. "You talk like the hero of a novel -- the kind my governess used to read. In the first place I should never recognize that kind of right, as you call it -- never!"
"-- oh, why should you and I make mysteries to each other?"
She looked at him helplessly, penetrated by the despairing sense of their inaccessibility
to each other. Then she remembered that Nick, during their last talk together,
had seemed as inaccessible, and wondered if, when human souls try to get too
near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
She would have liked to say this to Streff-but he would not have understood
it either. The sense of loneliness once more enveloped her, and she groped
in vain for a word that should reach him.
The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with stifling fumes.
She seemed to hear what the couples were saying to each other, she pictured the drawing-rooms, restaurants, dance-halls they were hastening to, the breathless routine that was hurrying them along, as Time, the old vacuum-cleaner, swept them away with the dust of their carriage-wheels. And again the loneliness vanished in a sense of release ....
They were silent for a while; then he began again: "You said it yourself
yesterday, you know."
She strayed back from sunlit distances. "Yesterday?"
"Yes: that Grace Fulmer says you can't separate two people who've been through
a lot of things -- "
"Ah, been through them together -- it's not the things, you see, it's the
togetherness," she
interrupted.
"The togetherness -- that's it!" He seized on the word as if it had
just been coined to express their case, and his mind could rest in it without
farther
labour.
They seemed to have said everything to each other, and yet barely to have begun
what they had to tell; and at each step they took, their heavy feet dragged
a great load of bliss.
