Serving up another helping of fictional emotion, today we look at contentment. Peace. Satisfaction. Completeness. Not so much joy or exuberance or excitement – those are sharper feelings. Contentment is a more general placidity. The Pacific Ocean smacking a rocky cove is exuberance: Crater Lake in the fall is contentment.
But contentment is personal, isn’t it – especially the contentment that is 100% synonymous with completeness. As such, it is contextual. In a novel, contentment for a character should depend on the thing they’re about to lose, or the thing they want to gain. When you watch a movie, see how many start out with scenes of contentment: Eragon – and probably myriad other fantasy stories – are prime examples. Eragon begins at the farm, playfully rough-housing with his cousin Roran. We don’t even need to be told that this will soon end, and life will irrevocably change for Eragon. Other stories end with contentment: “They lived happily ever after” is not clichéd by under-use, after all. But good stories with happy endings, I would argue, give us glimpses of contentment along the way, foreshadowing the resolution of the story. Because, you see, it is difficult to know the protagonist is content at the end of the story unless we know what contentment looks like to the protagonist before the end of the story. However, since I’m only doing a snippet of fiction here, I’ll do the best I can.
Enjoy.
His had been a long life. Not that he was old – well, a twenty-something kid might call him old. But his had been a life full of long days. Winters in Buffalo, New York meant waking up early to dig out the sidewalk and car, and summers meant working first shift at the factory. He lost a son to war twenty years ago, and a wife to cancer five years after that. His mother and father were long gone, of course, and the rest of his family had never been close.
But he’d put in his time. He’d made it. Five years ago he met Aggie, and they soon married. They sat now, hand in hand, on a porch swing in Colorado; his front yard extended across rolling hills to the Rocky Mountains, and hired landscapers kept the verdant lawn between the house and the driveway at a pleasant height. Pale shadows from shimmering, billowing clouds slid across the green ranges to the west, and a mild, cooling breeze ruffled the grasses. Wind chimes on the far corner of the house lent deep, sauntering tones to the evening, blending time into insignificance.
As the sun lowered, and another day of his life was closing, he drew a deep breath. “What do you think heaven is like?” he asked quietly.
Aggie smiled and squeezed his hand. “We’ll be a lot younger,” she replied.
See you tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment