Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last. - James Salter

Every object, even those which had been hers, which he never touched, seemed to share his loss. He was suddenly parted from his life. That presence, loving or not, which fills the emptiness of rooms, mildens them, makes them light — that presence was gone. The simple greed that makes one cling to a woman left him suddenly desperate, stunned. A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained.

incandescent afternoons in Spain, the shutters closed, a blade of sun burning into the darkness.

Paris seems wondrous to me now, even a little too rich. I'm strangely devout, I find myself defending the meager life of the provinces as if it were something special. It's not like the life of Paris, I say, which is exactly like being on some great ocean liner. It's in the little towns that one discovers a country, in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and small nights.