The snow falling faintly outside this afternoon has brought back memories of one of my favourite films ever, one that I always watch with deep emotion.
John Huston's final work, a faithful adaptation of James Joyce's short story 'The Dead', from the collection Dubliners, is an elegiac tale about the inexorable passing of time, the perception of ageing and mortality, and the ways in which the memory of loss impinges on our relationship with the present.
http://www.videodetective.com/movies/trailers/the-dead-trailer/698
The backdrop of the story is a Christmas family reunion in the Dublin of the early 1900s, but its appeal is universal, beautiful, shattering, particularly the final scene in which Gabriel Conroy muses on his wife's revelation of her long-deceased lover and is overwhelmed by self-doubt, by regret at his own emotional paralysis and lack of passion, which make him suddenly aware of his own frailty, of the fading and passing of everything, as he contemplates the blank snowy landscape outside:
One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
--from 'The Dead', by James Joyce.
