A remarkable novel comes to an end. A stamp placed upon its pages. I am reminded of a distant novel read in Fremont, Ohio ‘Mr. Ive’s Christmas’ by Oscar Hijuelos. God is good and merciful.

It was laughable. I actually laughed aloud, panting a little, leaning against one of the vine-stakes, and looking at the pale sea of mist in which villages and village churches and poplar- lined roads lay drowned. The setting sun pierced through with difficulty to light that buried world. I could feel, I could see, I could touch my guilt. It was not only that my heart had become a nest of vipers, that it had been filled with hatred for my children, with a lust for vengeance and a grasping love of money. What was worse than that was that I had refused to look beyond the tangle of vile snakes. had treasured their knotted hideousness as though it had been the central reality of my being as though the beating of the life-blood in my veins had been the pulse of all those swarming reptiles. Not content with knowing, through half a century, only of myself what was not truly me at all, I had carried the same ignorance into my dealing with others. The expression of squalid greed on the faces of my children had held me fascinated. Confronted by Robert, I had been able to see only his stupidity, because it was all I had wanted to see. I had never once realized that the superficial appearance of others was something I must break through, a barrier that I must cross, if I was ever to make contact with the real man, the real woman beyond and behind it. That was the discovery I ought to have made when I was thirty or forty. . . .

But now I am an old man. The movement of my heart is too sluggish. I am watching the last autumn of my life as it puts the vines to sleep and stupefies them with its fumes and sunlight. Those whom I should have loved are dead, and dead, too, those whom I could have loved. I have neither the time now, nor the strength, to embark upon a voyage of exploration with the object of finding the reality of others. Everything in me, even my voice, even my gestures, belongs to the monster whom I reared against the world, the monster to whom I gave my name.  –“The Knot of Vipers” Francois Mauriac