The Master

26 May 2026: Working my way through another book that has sat on a bedside table for nearly a decade: Colm Tóibín's The Master. Beautiful and haunting prose throughout so far. This passage stuck with me today, as Tóibín's fictionalized version of Henry James remembers meeting a wounded Civil War soldier at a Union hospital camp: 

"He wanted to hold his young frined, help him now that the worst was over, take him home to his family to be looked after. But he also know that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would not be disturbed. The gap between the two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone its own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency" (166-7).

Work Cited

Tóibín, Colm. The Master: A Novel. Scribner, 2004.