“What once seemed ours forever”

From J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella A Month in the Country :

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours forever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

A Month in the Country is best read in summer, especially when fall begins to loom — as I suppose it always does.

Another passage from A Month in the Country
“Creatures of hope”

[The novella has been reissued by New York Review Books (2000).]