The Planet at the Last Bus Stop
All my reviews so far of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
THE LAST BUS by Elizabeth Bowen
“‘Well, whoever we are,’ she said, ‘we’ve all got to get to somewhere.’”
“…one; one would be left behind by oneself, travelling slowly, and still worse, without any certainty of one’s direction.”
…each passenger with their own fixed destiny versus their free will’s pre-planning of destination… The opportune moment amid my current Zeno’s Paradox obsession with literature to have now pulled this story title from the Bowen hat as the next Bowen story to read and real-time review today! A group of strangers, a civil servant, a pair of lovers, a student, an enthusiastic boy, a spinster, a clergyman, a Frenchman, an American etc., and a Mr Man and a Ms Woman, too, who had been strangers now part of group upon the last bus broken down at a benighted and secluded bus stop near the sea, with one passenger suggesting that, mind over matter, that they could agree on a destination (as gestalt?) and literarily, if not literally, will the conked-out bus there! With thoughts like “time has no object”, and the student thinks that science is about to revolutionise time itself, and someone else saying “it’s so like life — sitting there on your bottom wondering what will happen”, the boy countering with “whichever way I’m going, I’m going somewhere!”, or diversionary tactics to make time move faster, while the clergyman mildly debates the civil servant’s sarcastic comment that the clergyman’s “faith moves mountains.”
Mountains come to me, I find, if I stay still long enough, like that last bus. Null Immortalis.
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