APS TOGETHER
Day 3
Chapter 2, p. 37-62 (through “The other two women looked across the street and they all watched him disappear.”)
December 5, 2020 by Claire Messud
“You must admit…that the land is nicer than the sea,” says Mrs. Copperfield: “She herself had a great fear of drowning.”As does Miss Gamelon. Miss Goering has other terrors. Facing one’s greatest fears is a serious moral challenge that can look to others simply strange.
“When people believed in God they carried Him from one place to another…God watched over everybody…Now there is nothing to carry with you…” A Godless world is desolate: “I must try to find a nest in this outlandish place,” Mrs. Copperfield decides. Memory is one answer to this conundrum.
Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield, Americans in Panama, want not to be tourists: Mrs. C notes that “The hardier tourists find that one place resembles another.” [p.48] For the Copperfields, as Flaubert said, “Not to be like one’s neighbor, that is everything.”
The prostitute who captures Mrs. Copperfield’s heart is aptly named Pacifica. “What has the absence of worry to do with beauty?” Mrs. Copperfield asks her; and she wisely replies, “That has everything to do with what is beautiful in the world.”
