Tadzio, with the three or four playmates he still had, was walking about on the right in front of his family’s bathing cabin; and reclining in his deck-chair with a rug over his knees, about midway between the sea and the row of cabins, Aschenbach once more sat watching him. The boys’ play was unsupervised, as the women were probably busy with travel preparations; it seemed to be unruly and degenerating into roughness. The sturdy boy he had noticed before, the one in the belted suit and with glossy black hair whom they called ‘Jasiu’, had been angered and blinded by some sand thrown into his face: he forced Tadzio to a wrestling match, which soon ended in the downfall of the less muscular beauty. But as if in this hour of leave-taking the submissiveness of the lesser partner had been transformed into cruel brutality, as if he were now bent on revenge for his long servitude, the victor did not release his defeated friend even then, but knelt upon his back and pressed his face into the sand so hard and so long that Tadzio, breathless from the fight in any case, seemed to be on the point of suffocation. His attempts to shake off the weight of his tormentor were convulsive; they stopped altogether for moments on end and became a mere repeated twitching. Appalled, Aschenbach was about to spring to the rescue when the bully finally released his victim. Tadzio, very pale, sat up and went on sitting motionless for some minutes, propped on one arm, his hair tousled and his eyes darkening. Then he stood right up and walked slowly away. His friends called to him, laughingly at first, then anxiously and pleadingly; he took no notice. The dark-haired boy, who had not doubt been seized at once by remorse at having gone so far, ran after him and tried to make up the quarrel. A jerk of Tadzio’s shoulder rejected him. Tadzio walked on at an angle down to the water. He was barefooted and wearing his striped linen costume with the red bow.

At the edge of the sea he lingered, head bowed, drawing figures in the wet sand with the point of one foot, then walked into the shallow high water, which at its deepest point did not even wet his knees; he waded through it, advancing easily, and reaching the sand-bar. There he stood for a moment looking out into the distance and then, moving left, began slowly to pace the length of this narrow strip of unsubmerged land. Divided from the shore by a width of water, divided from his companions by proud caprice, he walked, a quite isolated and unrelated apparition, walked with floating hair out in the sea, in the wind, in front of the nebulous vastness. Once more he stopped to survey the scene. And suddenly, as if prompted by a memory, by and impulse, he turned at the waist, one hand on his hip, with an enchanting twist of the body, and looked back over his shoulder at the beach. There the watcher sat, as he had sat once before when those twilight-grey eyes, looking back at him then from that other threshold, had for the first time met his. Resting his head on the back of his chair, he had slowly turned it to follow the movements of the walking figure in the distance; now he lifted it towards that last look, then it sank down on his breast, so that his eyes stared up from below, while the face wore the inert, deep-sunken expression of profound slumber. But to him it was as if the pale and lovely soul-summoner out there was smiling to him, beckoning to him; as if he loosed his hand from his hip and pointed outwards, hovering ahead and onwards, into an immensity rich with unutterable expectation. And as so often, he set out to follow him.

Minutes passed, after he had collapsed sideways in his chair, before anyone hurried to his assistance. He was carried to his room. And later that same day the world was respectfully shocked to receive the news of his death.

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Pa stands beside the bed. From behind his leg Vardaman peers, with his round head and his eyes round and his mouth beginning to open. She looks at Pa; all her failing life appears to drain into her eyes, urgent, irremediable. “It’s Jewel she wants,” Dewey Dell says.

“Why, Addie,” pa says, “him and Darl went to make one more load. They thought there was time. That you would wait for them, and that three dollars and all …” He stoops, laying his hand on hers. For a while yet she looks at him, without reproach, without anything at all, as if her eyes alone are listening to the irrevocable cessation of his voice. Then she raises herself, who has not moved in ten days. Dewey Dell leans down, trying to press her back.

“Ma,” she says; “ma.”

She is looking out the window, at Cash stooping steadily at the board in the failing light, labouring on toward darkness and into it as though the stroking of the saw illuminated its own motion, board and saw engendered.

“You, Cash,” she shouts, her voice harsh, strong, and unimpaired. “You, Cash!”

He looks up at the gaunt face framed by the window in the twilight. It is a composite picture of all time since he was a child. He drops the saw and lifts the board for her to see, watching the window in which the face has not moved. He drags a second plank into position and slants the two of them into their final juxtaposition, gesturing toward the ones yet on the ground, shaping with empty hand in pantomime the finished box. For a while still she looks down at him from the composite picture, neither with censure nor approbation. Then the face disappears.

She lies back and turns her head without so much as glancing at pa. She looks at Vardaman; her eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as if someone had leaned down and blown upon them.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying 

‘What I would do,’ he said, ‘is something that no gentleman could possibly divulge. Faith: that is what you need. Faith in me, my dear.’

‘There would be nothing you could do,’ said Irma, ignoring her husband’s suggestion that she should have faith in him. ‘Nothing at all. You’re too old.’

Bellgrove, who had been about to resume his seat, remained standing. His back was to his wife. A dull pain began to grow beneath his ribs. A sense of black injustice of bodily decay came over him, but a rebellious voice crying in his heart ‘I am young, I am young,’ while carnal witness of his three score years and ten sank suddenly at the knees.

In a moment Irma was at his side. ‘Oh my dear one! What is it? What is it?’

She lifted his head and put a cushion beneath it. Bellgrove was fully conscious. The shock of finding himself suddenly on the floor had upset him for a moment or two and had taken his breath away, but that was all.

‘My legs went,’ he said, looking up at the earnest face above him with its wonderfully sharp nose. ‘But I am all right again.’

Directly he had made this remark he was sorry for it, for he could have done with an hour of nursing.

Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast 

Mrs Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong. But the first few weeks after Mrs Pettigrew came to the Colstons to look after Charmain she sat in the kitchen and told Mrs Anthony of her troubles.

‘Have a fag,’ said Mrs Anthony, indicating with her elbow the packet on the table while she poured strong tea. ‘Everything might be worse.’

Mrs Pettigrew said, ‘It couldn’t very well be worse. Thirty years of my life I gave to Mrs Lisa Brooke. Everyone knew I was to get that money. Then this Guy Leet turns up to claim. It wasn’t any marriage, that wasn’t. Not a proper marriage.’ She pulled her cup of tea towards her and, thrusting her head close to Mrs Anthony’s, told her in what atrocious manner and for what long-ago reason Guy Leet had been incapable of consummating his marriage with Lisa Brooke.

Mrs Anthony swallowed a large sip of tea, the cup of which she held in both hands, and breathed back into the cup while the warm-smelling steam spread comfortably over her nose. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘a husband’s a husband. By law.’

‘Lisa never recognized him as such,’ said Mrs Pettigrew. ‘No one knew about the marriage with Guy Leet, until she died, the little swine.’

‘I thought you says she was all right,’ said Mrs Anthony.

‘Guy Leet,’ said Mrs Pettigrew. ‘He’s the little swine.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, the courts will have something to say to that, dear, when it comes up. Have a fag.’

‘You’re making me into a smoker, Mrs Anthony. Thanks, I will. But you should try to cut them down, they aren’t too good for you.’

‘Twenty a day since I was twenty-five and seventy yesterday,’ said Mrs Anthony.

‘Seventy! Gracious, you’ll be – ’

‘Seventy years of age yesterday.’

‘Oh, seventy. Isn’t it time you had a rest then? I don’t envy you with this lot,’ Mrs Pettigrew indicated with her head the kitchen door, meaning the Colstons residing beyond it.

‘Not so bad,’ said Mrs Anthony. ‘He’s a bit tight, but she’s nice. I like her.’

Muriel Spark, Momento Mori

I was interested. Here was a man, a live man. I was in no hurry to go into the cabin, where I knew Wada was unpacking my things, so I paced up and down the deck with the huge Mr. Pike. Huge he was in all conscience, broad-shouldered, heavy-boned, and, despite the profound stoop of his shoulders, fully six feet in height.

“You are a splendid figure of a man,” I complimented.

“I was, I was,” he muttered sadly, and I caught the whiff of whiskey strong on the air.

I stole a look at his gnarled hands. Any finger would have made three of mine. His wrist would have made three of my wrist.

“How much do you weigh?” I asked.

“Two hundred an’ ten. But in my day, at my best, I tipped the scales close to two-forty.”

“And the Elsinore can’t sail,” I said, returning to the subject which had roused him.

“I’ll take you even, anything from a pound of tobacco to a month’s wages, she won’t make it around in a hundred an’ fifty days,” he answered. “Yet I’ve come round in the old Flyin’ Cloud in eighty-nine days–eighty-nine days, sir, from Sandy Hook to ‘Frisco. Sixty men for’ard that was men, an’ eight boys, an’ drive! drive! drive! Three hundred an’ seventy-four miles for a day’s run under t’gallantsails, an’ in the squalls eighteen knots o’ line not enough to time her. Eighty-nine days–never beat, an’ tied once by the old Andrew Jackson nine years afterwards. Them was the days!”

“When did the Andrew Jackson tie her?” I asked, because of the growing suspicion that he was “having” me.

“In 1860,” was his prompt reply.

“And you sailed in the Flying Cloud nine years before that, and this is 1913–why, that was sixty-two years ago,” I charged.

“And I was seven years old,” he chuckled. “My mother was stewardess on the Flyin’ Cloud. I was born at sea. I was boy when I was twelve, on the Herald o’ the Morn, when she made around in ninety-nine days–half the crew in irons most o’ the time, five men lost from aloft off the Horn, the points of our sheath-knives broken square off, knuckle-dusters an’ belayin’-pins flyin’, three men shot by the officers in one day, the second mate killed dead an’ no one to know who done it, an’ drive! drive! drive! ninety-nine days from land to land, a run of seventeen thousand miles, an’ east to west around Cape Stiff!”

“But that would make you sixty-nine years old,” I insisted.

“Which I am,” he retorted proudly, “an’ a better man at that than the scrubby younglings of these days. A generation of ‘em would die under the things I’ve been through.”

Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore

Mrs Beaty lived and let live, a woman of sixty-nine, gone half deaf; she wore a grey comb in her hair and a hearing button in her left ear but rarely turned it on except to answer the phone when she ‘felt’ it ringing, and to talk with Levin when he ate in the kitchen – this was their major involvement. Sometimes when he avoided her he realized she was avoiding him. She went to bed at eight each night, except on rare nights she entertained; and early the next morning, wearing galoshes to protect her shoes from the wet grass, was already snipping flowers, or poking into the shrubbery around the house. She lived unselfconsciously in the presence of her dead husband’s cabinetry, rocking chair, pipes; his tools were still hanging above his workbench in the cellar. She had, she sometimes said, nothing against the world, and Levin envied her a little.

Bernard Malamud, A New Life

The house, however, was surrounded by a garden, in which the Rector took considerable pride. The lawn, which fronted the drawing-room windows, was a rich and uniform green, unspotted by a single daisy, and on the other side of it two straight paths led past beds of tall, standing flowers to a charming grassy walk, where the Rev. Wyndham Datchet would pace up and down at the same hour every morning, with a sundial to measure the time for him. As often as not, he carried a book in his hand, into which he would glance, then shut it up, and repeat the rest of the ode from memory. He had most of Horace by heart, and had got into the habit of connecting this particular walk with certain odes which he repeated daily, at the same time noting the condition of his flowers, and stooping now and again to pick any that were withered or overblown. On wet days, such was the power of habit over him, he rose from his chair at the same hour, and paced his study for the same length of time, pausing now and then to straighten some book in the bookcase, or alter the position of the two brass crucifixes standing upon cairns of serpentine stone upon the mantelpiece. His children had a great respect for him, credited him with far more learning than he actually possessed, and saw that his habits were not interfered with, if possible. Like most people who do things methodically, the Rector himself had more strength of purpose and power of self-sacrifice than of intellect or of originality. On cold and windy nights he rode off to visit sick people, who might need him, without a murmur; and by virtue of doing dull duties punctually, he was much employed upon committees and local Boards and Councils; and at this period of his life (he was sixty-eight) he was beginning to be commiserated by tender old ladies for the extreme leanness of his person, which, they said, was worn out upon the roads when it should have been resting before a comfortable fire.

Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

So that’s right: the target is driving along without a care in the world. He may be whistling. Perhaps he is listening to music; and because he is driving some of his mind is just plugged into the city… He reaches the end of the side street and slows as he approaches the traffic lights that guard a main road. It is evening and the bloodbath of sunset is daubed over the rooftops. No, it is darker, and on its way to being a dark night. In front of him before the red light is a woodframed Morris Minor, gentlest of cars. The red light spells arterial warning; then red-amber; then green. And the Morris Minor backs into him – and stalls.

Mrs Agnes Trounce, a widow, sixty-eight years of age in a little-old-lady hat and a grey-white shawl (nice touch), climbs flusterdly from her car and turns towards the target with her eyes benign and pleading. He climbs out too. Well, these things happen. But you’d be surprised how impatient, how non-understanding, people can be in such circumstances. None of this ‘Dear oh dear – well, not to worry!’ It’s ‘What you doing on the road anyway, you fucking old cow?’ And this makes things easier for Agnes Trounce. Because then the two young men, big lads, who have been lying low in the back of the Morris suddenly extend their bodies into the street. Then it’s ‘You rammed my mum!’ Or, if you were using black talent, ‘You rammed my gran!’ and so on. ‘That’s my mum you’re fucking swearing at!’ Or ‘That’s my gran you’re calling a fucking old cow!’ Agnes Trounce gets back into her woody Morris and drives away. And the target’s head, by this time, is jerking and crunching around between the door and the door frame. It was just a motoring dispute that got out of hand and you know how people are about their cars.

Martin Amis, The Information

I hadn’t meant to say anything about burning Hickson’s house down. Now, when I say anything like that, about shooting a man or cutting his tripes out, even in joke, I often get angry with him. And anything like bad temper is bad for me. It spoils my equanimity. It blocks up my imagination. It makes me stupid so that I can’t see straight. But luckily, I noticed it in time. Cool off, I said to myself. Don’t get rattled off your centre. Remember that Hickson is an old man. He’s nervous and tired of worry. That’s his trouble, worry. Poor old chap, it’s ruining any happiness he’s got left. He simply don’t know what to do. He sends you to jug and it makes him miserable, and soon as you come out you start on him again. And he’s afraid that if he gives you any money, you’ll come after him more than ever and fairly worry him death. Simply daren’t trust you. He’s wrong, but there it is. That’s his point of view. He daren’t do the right thing and the wrong thing gives him no peace. Poor old chap. It’s an awful problem for a poor old bastard that let down his guts about forty years ago, and has rolled in comfort all his life.

And I was so calm, that when I felt my pulse, it barely touched seventy-eight. Pretty good for a man of sixty-seven.

Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth 

I have seen Cairo since the war years and that time seemed to shimmer as a mirage over the present. The Hiltons and the Sheratons were real enough, the teeming jerry-built dun-coloured traffic-ridden deafening city, but in my head was that other potent place, conjured up by the smell of dung and paraffin, the felt-shod tittuping sound of a donkey’s hooves, kites floating in a Wedgwood blue sky, the baroque gaiety of Arabic script.

The place didn’t look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger