Appropriate Utterance

94 MARK HALLIDAY APPROPRIATE UTTERANCE If on a normal sunny day we happened to meet and I said “How are you?” and you answered “I am sorry for your loss” you might be implying, with understated eloquence, that your own well-being is inseparable from mine as we share in the human condition of living in time whereby at every moment we have been abandoned by the reality of a moment ago and yesterday is irretrievable and memory gives us only a filmy spray of images representing a teasy scrap of what we saw and what we felt and this is true even when what is gone from today is someone you did truly love. And if you were to speak to me briefly on the street or in a store and I said as I moved away “Nice to see you” the remark might not be banal, it could mean that I appreciate our painfully limited condition of being persons largely obscured from view yet still with some capacity to perceive one another and to affirm that I have, despite the deluge of atomizing distractions, observed that you stand there facing me in your essential dignity. When I walked into the funeral home to attend the service for an old colleague I’d hardly known a woman I didn’t recognize approached and thanked me for being there and paused and said “I’m Nancy” and I murmured “Nice to see you” and turned away confused and found a seat among the mourners, realizing 95 how gracefully the widow had acted as if my phrase had been right enough for the occasion, as if I’d said what a person should say. ...