Anger at the Weather
天気への怒り
The anger, when it finally came, chose an absurd occasion: a flawless spring morning, blue and utterly indifferent.
How dare the sky be so blue? How dare the crocuses insist on rising, punctual and smug, as though nothing whatever had ended?
I stood at the window and felt a fury so to its object that it frightened me with its heat.
The world had lost her, and the world had not so much as slowed; the buses ran, the birds performed, the light poured carelessly on.
What an , that the universe should be so composed, so unbothered, so obscenely willing to continue without her!
I wanted the weather to grieve; I wanted storms; I wanted the whole indifferent machinery of April to stop and account for itself.
Anger, I discovered, is grief that has found a target, and any target will do when the true one cannot be reached.
I could not be angry at death, which has no face, so I was angry at the daffodils, which at least had petals.
I was angry at strangers who laughed, at friends who did not call, at friends who did, at the phone, at the silence.
The rage was , alighting on trifles: a jammed drawer, a slow kettle, a pen that would not, would not write.
Each small became an outrage, a personal insult delivered by a cosmos I had privately decided was entirely to blame.
I knew, even as I seethed, that the anger was unjust, and the knowing did nothing whatsoever to cool it.
That is the humiliation of this stage: one watches oneself behave irrationally and remains utterly unable to .
Marta would have laughed at me, gently, and the thought that she could no longer laugh at me made me angrier still.
I shouted, once, at the empty kitchen, and the emptiness absorbed the shout without comment, as emptiness always does.
The weather was innocent; the daffodils were innocent; everyone and everything I raged at was, of course, entirely innocent.
The only guilty party had slipped beyond all reach of my accusation, taking with her the argument I most needed to have.
For I realised that my fury was, underneath, a protest, a refusal to accept a I had never been consulted upon.
Who had signed this? Who had approved it? To what could a widower appeal the sentence passed upon his whole life?
There was no , no clerk, no ; there was only the blue sky, serenely declining to be sued.
And so the anger, having no legitimate defendant, turned inevitably and cruelly toward the one target always available: myself.
I should have noticed sooner; I should have insisted on the specialist; I should have, I should have, I should have.
The rage at the weather, I began to see, was only the anger at myself, wearing a costume it could just about bear.
It is easier to shake a fist at the sky than to admit the softer, more terrible feeling waiting patiently behind the fist.
When the fury finally ebbed, it left me exhausted, ashamed, and strangely lighter, as a fever leaves the body it has burned.
The daffodils were still there, still yellow, still indifferent, and I found, to my surprise, that I no longer wished them dead.
I even, toward evening, apologised to them, half in jest and half in earnest, which is perhaps where a kind of healing begins.
But the lowered fist revealed its true palm: a bargain I longed to strike, if only I could find someone with whom to strike it.