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Author’s Note: The ending of this story [The Distracted Preacher] with the marriage of Lizzy and the minister was almost de rigour in an English magazine at the time of writing. But at this late date, thirty years after, it may not be amiss to give the ending that would have been preferred to the writer to the convention used above. Moreover it corresponds more closely with the true incident of which the tale is a vague and flickering shadow. Lizzy did not, in fact, marry the minister, but—much to her credit in the author’s opinion—stuck to Jim the smuggler, and emigrated with him after their marriage, an expatrial step rather forced upon him by his adventurous antecedents. They both died in Wisconsin between 1850 and 1860. (May 1912). Thomas Hardy, The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales (Penguin 1979), 99.

. . . and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like Andulasian girls used or shall I wear a red ye and now he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and my first I put my arm around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and I said yes I will Yes. James Joyce, Ulysses, new ed. (Random House, 1961), 793 (end).

In the beginning is the relation. Marin Buber, I and Thou, trans Walter Kaufmann (Scribner’s, 1970), 69.

'And he come around the back of the truck and he stood there, and her not even looking surprised. “I done come too far now,” he says. “I be dog if I’m going to quit now.” And her looking at him like she had known all the time what he was going to do before he even knew himself what he was going to, and that whatever he done, he wasn’t going to mean it.

'"Ain’t nobody never said for you to quit," she says. He laughs, lying in the bed, laughing. Yes, sir. You cant beat a woman. Because do you know what I think? I think she was just travelling. I don’t think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following. I don’t think she had ever aimed to, only she hadn’t told him yet. I reckon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in in her life. And she had got along all right his far, with folks taking good care of her. And so I think she had just made up her mind to travel a little further and see as much as she could, since I reckon she knew that when she settled down this time, it would likely be for the rest of her life. That’s what I think. Sitting back there in the truck, with him by her now and the baby that hadn’t never stopped eating, that had been eating breakfast now for about ten miles, like one of those dining cars on the train, and her looking out and watching the telephone poles and the fences passing like it was a circus parade. Because after a while I says, ‘Here comes Saulsbury,’ and she says,

“’What?’ and I says,

“’ Saulsbury, Tennessee,’ and I looked back and saw her face. And it was like it was already fixed and waiting to be surprised, and that she knew that when the surprise come, she was going to enjoy it. And it did come and it didn’t suit her. Because she said,

“’My, my. A body does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now its already Tennessee.’” William Faulkner, Light in August (Random House, 1932), 480 (end).

Nietzsche speaks of love of fate and pronounces the eternal yes to existence; and Freud reintroduces the tragic anagkē [necessity] into the principle of reality. But hope is diametrically opposed, as passion for the possible, to this primacy of necessity. It is allied with the imagination insofar as the latter is the power of the possible and the disposition for being in a radical renewal. Freedom in the light of hope, expressed in psychiatric terms, is nothing else than this creative imagination of the possible. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Northwestern U., 1974), 408.