The Scarlet Ruse

"I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades? The world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each others faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far to feel the heat of the fire.

Everything seems to come to me in some kind of second-hand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they? Yet when most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog of remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what strangeness is beside them, trying to be something else.

Once, just deep enough into the cup to try and be articulate about subjective things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange expression on his face. 'But we are all like that!' he said. 'That's the way it is! For everyone in the world! Didn't you know?'"

- John D. MacDonald, "The Scarlet Ruse"

Overwrought piece of dreck or, you know, something else?