标题: 2022.09.16 在最后的时刻，女王无处不在 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-9-20 01:52 标题: 2022.09.16 在最后的时刻，女王无处不在 For a last moment the Queen is everywhere
Her image is fixed over the streets. The rest of us are merely passing
Sep 16th 2022
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By Ann Wroe
Time and again we have heard the word in recent days. Britain is mourning the Queen’s “passing”. The Queen has “passed”. Not passed away – a more solemn antecedent, which brought to mind a collective doffing of tall hats – but simply passed, like a figure in a procession, or a shadow on the wall.
The word might seem apt in the Queen’s case. That is how she figured in people’s lives in Britain: smiling briefly on the news, walking along a line of children, waving in an open carriage that moved at a brisk clip – or, the only time she appeared in the flesh to me, behind the tinted window of her official Rolls-Royce as it came down Birdcage Walk in the rain. On state occasions, from the upper windows of The Economist’s former office in St James’s Street in central London, we would watch for the moment her gorgeous gilded carriage shone suddenly between two rows of buildings, and then vanished.
In a more general way, the ubiquity of “passing” is understandable. “Death” and “died” are difficult words to say, harder to face, brutal as a curse. Immediately the images crowd in of yellow skin and skulls, dust and shrouds and tilted gravestones; collapse, black absence.
There is a finality about death that people instinctively want to soften, both for their own sake and for others’. For those, like me, who believe in the soul’s immortality, death is a word that immediately needs clarifying: physical death, the death of the body. “Passing” on the other hand suggests continuity, a breezing through the scene, of someone whose spirit is bound elsewhere.
Passing is the stuff of everything we experience in the world. No one steps into the same river twice. No piece of music and no acting role is played the same way twice. In the mirror, we ourselves are never precisely the same. Clouds, moods, troubles, time, all surge continually past.
Nothing is dependable; nothing lasts. The rule applies to monarchs as much as to anyone else
On the Mall, in these strange September days, the seasons run together in confusion. The crowds in their thousands hold bouquets of summer, sunflowers and roses mostly, many wrapped ecologically in paper rather than cellophane. Yet they walk through sloughs of brown, crisp leaves that have already fallen, November-fashion, from the old plane trees. And in the mist of morning, after brief night rain, the trees have also recovered their light-greenness, which is almost of spring. Everything changes, nothing is dependable, nothing lasts. The rule applies to monarchs as much as to anyone else.
Yet, as with most euphemisms, “passing” simply won’t do as a death-word. It is weak and frail; it has no substance and no resistance. It is like the gun-salutes in the park, which trail off in smoke, or the bell-ringing which ends in echoes sinking under the hill. It is the passage of a ghost. Nothing remains.
We took it for granted, this constancy and constant presence
“Passing” does not begin to evoke the struggle and heft of life, the work and sweat of it, the weight of the person lost, whatever their class and condition. It even suggests indifference, as if the person who has died bestowed barely a glance or a thought on those around them. It is the most inadequate word imaginable for someone of the Queen’s discipline and devotion to her subjects, whose work was the hard graft of building the monarchy for the modern age. She “passes” with just a glint of a crown and a sweep of her long velvet robes, disappearing somewhere on the other side of Admiralty Arch. And we turn our attention to who, and what, comes next.
Except that many of us do not. In the days of mourning many of us have encountered the Queen in the same fleeting way as before, but now it is she who is steady and we who are carried past. She is no longer confined to her palaces but presiding everywhere across the nation, on backlit displays at bus stops or on notices quickly placed in the windows of cafés and letting agents.
Our figures, jumbled and reflected, pass across hers. At my local underground station, and by the departures board at St Pancras, she is suddenly there on the wall, larger than life-size, crowned and jewelled, ruling over the barriers where we heedlessly tap in and out to a thousand destinations.
In a way it has always been so – ever since we were first acquainted, a continuous quiet occupation of our minds. We took it for granted, this constancy and constant presence. Now we find ourselves the passing show, suddenly and strangely unmoored without her.■
Ann Wroe is The Economist’s obituaries editor. Her previous articles for 1843 magazine include an ode to the sun and why wild swimming is a sham
