You are not alone: a message to the quietly courageous

Eric Malpass, the daily firing squad, and the strange solace of being seen

In honor of British novelist Eric Malpass, today we’re featuring the glorious British artist Emma Haworth, born half a century after Malpass. This one’s called “Sunset Over the Park” (2022).

This one’s for you, if you’re one of those quietly courageous people who suffers a little more than most from life’s slings and arrows, but who soldiers on valiantly, nonetheless.

And this one’s for you if you have, or have ever had, a job that fills you each morning with dread.

And this one’s for you if you love a great novelist, the kind who tells you in every sentence how much he understands humanity — how much he understands you.

The novelist in question is the late Eric Malpass, who wrote some of my favorite novels, which I’m now re-reading: a series about the Pentecost family, who live in rural England during the mid-twentieth-century. Malpass is an extreme kindred spirit, plus he’s also hilarious, whimsical, and an exquisite observer of human dynamics.

Here’s the passage I want to share with you. It’s from his first novel, “Morning’s at Seven” (which is actually a really funny book, but also filled with moments like these):

“Waking long before dawn she would lie, curled up knees to chin in the warm darkness, knowing that these were her last minutes of peace. Once let the alarm clock burst into strident life, and she was faced with the awful struggle of making herself get up to face another term. Each time, she thought she couldn’t do it. Each time, she did. Her courage was enough to make the angels weep. But it was common. People like Rose face a firing squad every morning of their working lives.”

“Birds on the Path,” by Emma Haworth

I read that passage last night and was so moved by it—the part about the weeping angels, and the daily firing squad. I’m very lucky these days to wake up to work that I love, but it wasn’t always thus, and I knew exactly what Malpass was describing.

And it wasn’t the description itself that moved me so much, but rather the fact that so many humans share the same experience, and then that another human noticed, and took the time and had the talent to describe it, in a paragraph whose great subtext is:

You Are Not Alone.

So I just wanted to share it with you.

Please let me know if it moves you, too (and you can also share this post with a like-minded friend, or subscribe if you haven’t already, if you are so moved).