A Powerful Image

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with scenes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have thought of to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.” Wallace Stegner in Crossing to Safety.
Struck by the power of this image when I first read Stegner’s novel some years back--it came out in 1987--I tried it; yes, the slug dissolves. And yes, I‘ve thought of it often. Stegner’s story of two couples, the Langs and the Morgans, is worth a read, or a re-read if it’s been a while. A thoughtful look at love, survival and marriage, it has much to say about our ability to absorb and move beyond the tragic without dissolving or in essence, our capacity to reconstitute ourselves.