A picture of regret

 I admire Carson McCullers’s story “The Sojourner.” I think it paints a convincing picture of what regret is like. I also think that’s not easy to do.

“The Sojourner” is the story of John Ferris, who turns 38 during the story, and who has just buried his father in Georgia. Ferris is returning to Paris by way of New York. He sees his ex-wife, Elizabeth, on the street. It’s been eight years. Perhaps emotional from his father’s death, Ferris calls Elizabeth and has dinner with her and her husband and meets their son, Billy, and the new baby.

Ferris thinks of his own girlfriend and her 6-year-old son and feels inexplicably miserable.

I like this bit of dialog, which begins with Elizabeth saying that Ferris should visit again.

 

“You’re not going to be an expatriate, are you?”

“Expatriate,” Ferris repeated. “I don’t much like the word.”

“What’s a better word?” she asked.

He thought for a moment. “Sojourner might do.”

 

I’m biased because I believe there’s a connection between regret and how we live — and particularly how we go about getting rooted to a place and all the living things and that make up a place. We can be rooted there or just passing through. Or somewhere in between.

Regret is slippery, but I have felt it most when I’ve been a tourist when I should have been an inhabitant.

• Source: Carson McCullers’s “The Sojourner” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 233-24. The quotation is on p. 237.