"
"And all this life you've hated"
I looked up at her wrung and bitter face. "I haven't hated it," I lied,
my voice near breaking with the pain of it all. "Have you?"
IX
The perplexing thing about life is the irresolvable complexity of
reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrong
done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil.
As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resounded
a hundred discordant notes in the harsh angle of that shock. We were
furiously angry with each other, tender with each other, callously
selfish, generously self-sacrificing.
I remember Marion saying innumerable detached things that didn't hang
together one with another, that contradicted one another, that were,
nevertheless, all in their places profoundly true and sincere. I see
them now as so many vain experiments in her effort to apprehend the
crumpled confusions of our complex moral landslide. Some I found
irritating beyond measure. I answered her--sometimes quite abominably.
"Of course," she would say again and again, "my life has been a
failure.
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