“A pre-war sky. Before the first world war there were days and days like this; long English meadows, insect hum, innocence and blue sky” (161).
This passage occurs when the narrator is on a train to London, daydreaming (or, rather, creating fictions) about an idyllic day with Louise. The repetition of both the words “sky” and “days” creates a sense of infinity and/or endless time, even though our narrator is merely looking back on a moment that is constructed, a utopic fantasy. Meanwhile, the repetition of the word “war” seems to oppose this sense of serenity with its violent associations, but because the focus is on a time before war, the passage maintains its dreamy tone. Read aloud, the constant use of the ‘s’ sound (“insect hum, innocence”) further creates a feeling of warmth, sleepiness, and safety. In contrast with the novel’s opening, here nature connotes a return to happiness and peace.
Furthermore, the idea of “pre-war” suggests that war is inevitable, that this peaceful time has already ended. But the narrator’s ability to take nostalgic comfort in something rooted in the (fictional?) past demonstrates a blurring of the lines between past and present, and reveals that the narrator’s thoughts and memories are often the product of imagination. Despite the fact that this idyllic scene may exist in a realm far away from reality, the passage also implies that hope can be found in memory and in dreams. Whereas the narrator once constantly asked why the measure of love was loss, this idea of returning to the past (or returning to feelings from the past through fictional memory) has the potential to undercut the novel’s association between “love” and “loss,” because our narrator has not completely lost his/her grasp on Louise or those pre-war skies, even if they are both arguably his/her inventions. This passage, much like the end of the novel, leaves us wanting to know what is real and what is not real, but also asks us to see that perhaps that distinction is not so clear-cut, and that maybe “realness” is not even the point. Has our narrator fallen in love with a fiction? Is the past always a fictional place? Maybe love cannot be lost because love is always partly our own creation, never really entirely rooted in reality.