I’ve given up on re-reading The Flounder, a book I first read the summer I finished my undergraduate degree. However, having a bit more time to myself this summer, I promised myself I would read The Time Traveler’s Wife as part of my ‘research’ for the project/lecture that is formulating itself in the back of my head, related to my rescuing all sorts of normally inconsequential fragments from my dad’s house while getting it ready to sell.
The sadness, and the joy, of the book’s narrative is the very conscious knowledge that life is finite. The manner of Henry’s death slowly unfolds to him, as he gets closer in chronological age to the time when it will overtake him. He is the time traveler, and the frequency of his visits to the young Clare (at a period of her life before she meets him) increase as though he is trying to soak up as much as he can before he goes. The joy that permeates the narrative, in tandem with a pervading sense of calamity coming, is that in spite of his knowing that he is going to have a short life, he is able to be in the moment and completely enjoy these times with her.
I forget where I read or heard it, but some philosopher said that a person could only be truly happy when he knows the time and the manner of his own death. I can’t imagine that; my first thought is that I would not like to know–for goodness sake, it might be tomorrow. Even worse, it might be in a year’s time: not long enough to finish anything but long enough to get depressed about my own demise. However, if one could get used to the idea, I could see how there might be all sorts of things that would seem unimportant and not worth thinking about. So, perhaps I would do the best work of my life.
In the book, that terrible finality of a loved one’s death, and the numbing void that they leave behind them, is mitigated by the time travel. Henry leaves so many times, and Clare is bereft of him so often never knowing how long he will be away, that the long absence after his death is just more of the same, although much more heavily weighted. She knows that the thread has finally unwound to its very end but she doesn’t know how much of its looping in time she will encounter along the length of her own life.
Henry tells her that he will see her again at least once; I choose to believe that his one and only reconnection with her, when she is 82, is in order to be with her when she dies. At the point where he experiences this in his own life Clare is well, he finds out that she will live a long life after him, and he is not unduly saddened because it isn’t happening yet. When she sees him, she has already lost him and has lived through that grief, and now she gets to see him again. In between is the waiting; something which was part of her relationship with him when he was alive and, consequently, the thing that maintains their relationship for her, after he is dead.