Thanks to my fever I had a lot of weird and extremely vivid dreams, sweats where I thrashed around hardly knowing if it was day or night, but on the last and worst of these nights I dreamed about my mother: a quick, mysterious dream that felt more like a visitation. I was in Hobie’s shop—or, more accurately, some haunted dream space staged like a sketchy version of the shop—when she came up suddenly behind me so I saw her reflection in a mirror. At the sight of her I was paralyzed with happiness; it was her, down to the most minute detail, the very pattern of her freckles, she was smiling at me, more beautiful and yet not older, black hair and funny upward quirk of her mouth, not a dream but a presence that filled the whole room: a force all her own, a living otherness. And as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn’t turn around, that to look at her directly was to violate the laws of her world and mine; she had come to me the only way she could, and our eyes met in the glass for a long still moment; but just as she seemed about to speak–with what seemed a combination of amusement, affection, exasperation–a vapor rolled between us and I woke up.
The novel begins with Theo recounting a dream he has about his mother. This dream foreshadows the revelation of his mother's death, and introduces the haunting presence of her death. Her presence fills the room, and he is overwhelmed by her ghost. But, he also knows that he cannot look behind him in this dream—a metaphor for his inability to resurrect his mother. Even though he is preoccupied with memories and thoughts of her, she is ultimately a ghost, and a figure that only exists in his memories and dreams.
Soon, I knew, the night sky would turn dark blue; the first tender, chilly gleam of April daylight would steal into the room. Garbage trucks would roar and grumble down the street; spring songbirds would start singing in the park; alarm clocks would be going off in bedrooms all over the city. Guys hanging off the backs of trucks would toss fat whacking bundles of the Times and the Daily News to the sidewalks outside the newsstand. Mothers and dads all over the city would be shuffling around wild-haired in underwear and bathrobes, putting on the coffee, plugging in the toaster, waking their kids up for school.
And what would I do? Part of me was immobile, stunned with despair, like those rats that lose hope in laboratory experiments and lie down in the maze to starve.
I tried to pull my thoughts together. For a while, it had almost seemed that if I sat still enough, and waited, things might straighten themselves out somehow.
After the bombing of the Met, Theo is left alone in his apartment, unsure whether his mother is alive. This quote contrasts the livelihood of Manhattan, and the shift from night to day in the continual movement of the city, with Theo's stillness. Instead of moving forward with the day, and facing the reality that his mother may never come home, Theo wants to remain completely still and stop the progression of time. Overwhelmed by grief, he finds it hard to move, even though the rest of the city keeps moving.
And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
Even though Theo is not showing his grief in the way he is expected to, he still feels waves of sadness and depression after his mother's death. This quote shows how misunderstood Theo is, and how invisible his grief is to those around him, as even trained professionals cannot see his sadness, and instead interpret his silence as healthy coping.
“Although, I do have to say, it was difficult to imagine him going that way,” Hobie said, in the abrupt silence that had fallen. “The flash of lightning. Falling over unawares. Had a sense, you do sometimes, that it wasn’t like they said, you know... A goodbye at the gate,” said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. “That’s what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku—he wouldn’t have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death."
After Theo tells Hobie that he spoke with Welty right before his death, Hobie begins to talk to himself, processing Welty's death and last words as something he would have wanted. This quote shows that Hobie has difficulty accepting Welty's death, and that he is trying to make sense of it through rationalization. The soothing thought that Welty would have liked one final conversation, one stop at "a teahouse," before his death makes it easier for Hobie to internalize Welty's last moments.
I’d scattered my mother’s ashes in Central Park, though apparently there was a regulation against it; one evening while it was getting dark, I’d walked with Andy to a deserted area on the west side of the Pond and—while Andy kept a lookout—dumped the urn. What had disturbed me far more than the actual scattering of the remains was that the urn had been packed in shredded pieces of porno classifieds: SOAPY ASIAN BABES and WET HOT ORGASMS were two random phrases that had caught my eye as the gray powder, the color of moon rock, caught and spun in the May twilight.
After Theo finds out about Andy's death in a sailing accident, he recalls scattering his mother's ashes in Central Park. Though he tries to honor her by leaving her last remains in the park, her urn is wrapped in pornographic classified ads. These ads almost desecrate the urn and his kind gesture, as Theo realizes that he cannot preserve the sanctity of his mother's memory. His final interaction with her remaining physical parts is fundamentally imperfect, and he accepts that he will never have a perfect moment with her in death.
For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination, from the antique valentines and embroidered Chinese coats she collected to her tiny scented bottles from Neal’s Yard Remedies; there had always been something bright and magical about her unknown faraway life...
Theo realizes that his love for Pippa is irrational, and that it is directly tied to his love for his mother and his attempts to preserve his mother's memory. Pippa represents a time before his mother's death, and she carries a certain magic because she is just out of reach, much like the missing kingdom he imagines her to be. To Theo, Pippa embodies the idea of innocence and wonder and the feeling he wants to escape to.
It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.
After Andy's death, Theo realizes that Andy was one of the only people showing him kindness. He also realizes that his self-absorption and grief trapped him and made him numb to the kindness of others.
“Dumb of me not to have seen it earlier, after all the injuries, the crushed leg, the multiple surgeries; adorable drag in the voice, adorable drag in the step, the arm-hugging and the pallor, the scarves and sweaters and multiple layers of clothes, slow drowsy smile: she herself, the dreamy childhood her, was sublimity and disaster, the morphine lollipop I’d chased for all those years."
After Pippa admits that she loves Theo but cannot be with him, Theo realizes that Pippa largely exists in his dreams and conceptions of her, and is a "morphine lollipop" he chases. Like Theo Pippa is a victim of the bombing, a part of the disaster that both of them experience, but the thought of her also allows Theo to reach the sublime and to feel a respite from the horror of the bombing. Theo finally recognizes that a large component of his love for Pippa is her ability to anesthetize his pain.
And, increasingly, I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me—and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death.
In this passage, Theo elaborates a pessimistic view of life as a catastrophe, as something that is full of loss and tragedy and pain. Even though Theo does not consider life to be a pleasant experience, as his life is punctuated with heartbreak, death, and grief, he still believes life is worth living.
And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.
Here Theo elaborates the counterpart to his pessimistic vision. He hopes to exist in a space where reality and the interpretation of reality meet. He realizes that life is filled with grief and tragedy, but that this reality can also be confronted and interpreted in a way that creates "something sublime," something that is wonderful and worth living for.
