When the fire goes out

In Sebastian Barry’s novel, A Temporary Gentleman, Jack McNulty, protagonist and narrator of the story, sits in a house in newly-independent Ghana and writes a memoir of his life. It is not a happy tale, there are more regrets than happinesses, there are chances lost forever, moments that will never be redeemed, hurts that cannot be healed, but McNulty never drifts for long from a mood of optimism:

Our greatest trouble and our saving grace is that we have a soul. Time may seem like a great flood dragging with it all the debris of the past and catching you at last running through your own fields. Where there was once a great fire may seem only an ember now in the palm of your hand. But the ember is the soul and nothing on earth can rescind it.
-Sebastian Barry’s novel, A Temporary Gentleman

Our greatest trouble? That sense that life can never be entirely abandoned, that our failures and wrongdoings remain with us?
Our saving grace? That opportunity remains for failures to be corrected, for wrongs to be righted?

And indeed that we have a soul. (She too, I would hope.)

Without Jack McNulty’s ember, without a soul that cannot be rescinded we live lives of very little meaning and hope.