"Action" by C.E. Montague: my favorite part of the story

Postby Mr Underheel » Thu Jan 09, 2014 6:58 pm

This story was written in 1928 by Charles Edward Montague, an English journalist. The protagonist is Christopher Bell, a World War I veteran whose wife had died while he was recovering from war injuries and whose children had essentially abandoned him to lead their lives. At the age of 50 he had a mini-stroke that rendered his left side functional but numb. He fears that he will be come an invalid and that he will be "carted securely about from place to place, to sprawl in the sun--Mentone, the Canaries, Egypt, all the places to which the passe' butterflies of our commonwealth were brought to lie out and doze in the warmth when too much eating and idling had brought them back all the way to the status of larvae. Disgusting!"

Bell, an avid mountaineer, decides to end it all before he, too, becomes a larvae. There seems to be nothing and no one to live for, and with only a dreary future waiting for him, so he believes. He will climb the face of a glacier which has a bulging area that is even steeper than 90 degrees, a ballooning overhang. He will climb until he is exhausted and then will simply let go of his ice hand and footholds, falling to his death.

He executes his plan and, just before he gives up and gives in, an ice pick falls past his head, he hears a woman's cry, and then a distress yodel. All of this shakes him out of his "semidream" and into "Action". Adrenaline, or purpose, or whatever it was, somehow lightened his mind and "overflow(ed) lightness into Bell's body of lead. Strangely empowered," he began to climb again with unimaginable energy, until he discovered a man and his wife who hand become stranded on the ice face. She was dangling at the end of their climbing rope, having dropped her pick; he clung to the wall, holding her lifeline; she begged him to release her so that he could save himself. "Think of the kiddies", she implored.

Bell climbs to save them and they all descend the mountain. The man, Gollen, a physician, asks him about his near-suicide experience, about how close to death Bell had been, and how it felt, for 10 minutes, to have been "in Action". "Action?" Bell asks.

" 'Oh! I don't mean just doing violent things out of doors--pressing triggers or lassoing cows. I mean getting every Jack fibre there is in your nature alive and utterly turned on to something outside you--absorbed in it, lost in it--every bit of your consciousness taken up into some ecstasy of endeavour that's passion and peace.' "

"Bell nodded, and Gollen went on: 'I guess the great artists--all sorts of 'em--know how to bring the fit on, or it comes when they're at the top of their form--they seem to get further and further above 'emselves--hold the note out in a way that we can't--bring every tissue they have in their being to bear on the effort to get a wee touch to come right. Saints, too, I suppose--the pukka ones, like Francis, the man at Assisi: they have the knack too: they can get more alive; they've found how to exist at a sort of top pressure. I fancy all of us get just a glimpse of the thing now and then--of what living might be, you know--at a great turn in a game, or when we're in love, or if some beautiful thing in a book bowls us over. Only, we can't hold the note, or we can't do it yet: the pitch is too high for our reach; so we flop back into flatness.' "

Have you ever been "in Action", as Bell was? If so, why? Where? How did it happen? How long can you, or do you, sustain it?

Me? I have felt that way only once or twice. I remember, though, at the end of it, feeling the adrenaline draining from my body and how I felt utterly exhausted at the end of it all; how I nearly cried at that time. It made me understand how actors or athletes and others like them can get addicted to the feeling and the experience. Still, today, I crave it and struggle to find it again.

Action: How do I get back to it again?

Beyond that, I love the artistry of Montague's writing. It is far beyond my capabilities but it gives me something to shoot for. Check out his use of colons and semicolons. He uses them in ways that I never imagined. His vocabulary is incredible! There are so many words that I have to research. Love it!