An Atypical Affair
An Atypical Affair - meaning Summary
A Late Remorseful Memory
The speaker remembers a brief, striking encounter with a girl who confessed love in a neon drugstore, whose penetrating insight contrasted with an apparently untrustworthy demeanor. She dies soon after, and the speaker now feels retrospective guilt for not having been kinder. Hindsight reframes her candor as bound up with a fatal illness, challenging the speaker’s earlier notion that people remain merely ordinary even when facing death.
Read Complete AnalysesLong enough to remember the girl who proposed love to me in the neon light of the Park Avenue Drugstore (while her girl friends walked giggling in the night) who had such eerie mental insight into my coldness, coupled with what seemed to me an untrustworthy character, and who died a few months later, perhaps a month after I ceased thinking of her, of an unforeseen brain malignancy. By hindsight, I should have known that only such a state of deathliness could bare in a local girl such a luminous candor. I wish I had been kinder. This hindsight is the opposite, after all, of believing that even in the face of death man can be no more than ordinary man.
New York, January 1952
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