“It may all sound very petty to complain about, but I tell you that sort of thing settles down on one like a fine dust.”-Warner, Lolly WillowesThis book is an early distillation of a particular kind of novel that was being written periodically throughout the early twentieth century. These novels are all variations on the same theme, but the basic outline is the same. This one will serve to give you a pretty good idea of the lot:Edna Pontellier is the rather well-to-do wife of a New Orleans businessman with two children, a well-appointed home, servants and a clear, clearly fulfilled place in her particular social circle. Her husband is kind to her in many conventional ways: he spares no expense on the household, takes something of an interest in the raising of the children, buys her personal and lavish presents and summer holidays, seems to offer periodic compliments and is not at all jealous or possessive. He has his faults of course- he likes his routines to be how they are and he places great importance on his wife fulfilling her “feminine” role in the household and society- dealing with the servants, ensuring high quality dinners, ministering to his needs and generally putting him first when he is home, being constantly involved with children, paying the same morning calls to the same wives of business associates that she always has. None of these expectations is particularly out-of-line for her time and place, and indeed she has never had to bear some of the extra morally horrible but legally acceptable extra burdens other wives have to shoulder without questioning. Her husband is occasionally rude and out of temper, he sometimes spends his evening out with his friends and blames her unfairly for occurrences that are blown all out of proportion. But that's about it.And yet, “It may all sound very petty to complain about, but I tell you that sort of thing settles down on one like a fine dust.”Of course, as we know, this is not the real problem. The problem is with the underlying foundations of the Patriarchal System of Various Assumptions and Ground Rules. In this case, the System manifests in her husband’s casual assumption that she sees her “occupation” as he does, to live her life as a recommendation and added enticement to her husband’s business career, or even to further it. There’s a scene where he recommends that she accept and reject calling cards and invitations on the basis of whether each woman in question has a husband that will further his career. He expects to everything at home reflect his success out of the home, including the dinner he eats (which he seems to be more upset about on the basis that it does not suit his status than anything). He conceptualizes her private life as a “public” one (since she has no “public” one to add to his), bound by all the same accommodations and professional decisions that a person in a career might make. When she deviates from her conventionally feminine choices, he assumes she may need medical treatment.Like the feminine version of Bartleby the Scrivener, the rebellion phase begins with “I would prefer not to,” and continues until she’s figured out she would simply prefer not to live most of her life at all. Then of course, she has to decide what to do next.This is where a lot of the stories differ. In Lolly Willowes, perhaps the clearest parallel to this book, the book brings to the surface all the guilt and self-hatred that the “fine dust” can arouse in a woman used to a lifetime of its constraints. Lolly actually conceives herself to be a witch, an actual servant of the devil, because she finally chooses to live a life according to her desires, to ignore the claims and needs of others that she has spent her life seeing to. This especially dramatic is encouraged by the fact that Lolly has never achieved that supposed “highest calling” for women: a husband and children. Thus, all she is supposed to have to offer is a life of selfless service to others that she is dependent on. Thus it makes sense for her to consider herself not only less than nothing, but actually actively evil for denying to further repay what is seen as her only natural duty and place. All Passion Spent is another, perhaps more mature parallel. In this iteration, Lady Slane actually has achieved the husband and children. What is more, they are grown and successful, with children of their own. Her husband was an eminent public servant, and she fulfilled her “role” (just like Edna’s husband had requested) for all of her life. As Edna states clearly and expressively in The Awakening: "at a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life- that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions."Lady Slane has maintained this and chosen not to tell anyone for decades upon decades of marriage, so much so that even her family forgot that she was an actual person rather than a precious objects, of sorts, to be taken care of much as an heirloom might be. Her Bartleby moment comes through in a meeting deciding her future where her children have almost forgotten that she is a participant in the conversation. She decides to live out her life, like Lolly, in a house of her own. In this case it is the house itself, rather than an imaginary relationship with the devil, that becomes Lady Slane’s rebellion. A quirky, falling apart house with a sympathetic caretaker, becomes, bafflingly to her family, of greater interest to her than her children and grandchildren.The Enchanted April is a luxurious, loving and-all-too-temporary bath of the golden sunlight of the prime of this story. It’s presented as a fantasy of escape. The women involved take a house in Italy and spend charmed, perpetually-twilight-hour weeks of stillness, contemplation, repressed anger and joy escaping their obligations to their family, to their husbands or other men, their poses to the world and their need to repress their feelings. There is one woman, indeed, who sometimes barely seems to move at all, perpetually walking around with a suppressed, blissful smile on her face. There are men in the novel, but they enter what is clearly a world of women, enchanted indeed by their fantasies and repressed longings. Some women place more boundaries and limitations on letting themselves go than others, but the trend is there, and it is the opposite of what is found on the outside. Even this brief moment of suspension and stillness restores some of the women enough to go on, some couples leave transformed, more or less, and we fade out with quiet, with sheer quiet still the ultimate dream of nirvana.Mrs. Dalloway provides a different, more kaleidoscopic perspective on the same theme, perhaps even a slightly more optimistic and loving one in its own way. Clarissa Dalloway actually finds a kind of fulfillment in her duties as a housewife, in her every day errands and domestic creations. The interesting change of perspective here is that it seems like Woolf’s attempt to understand how this can be the case when she herself is so unlike this, rather than having the perspective be explaining a “different” woman to a mass of people who understand and live her opposite. Clarissa Dalloway, like Edna, understands that split between the interior and exterior life and instinctively lives it out each day. She, like these other women, has desires beyond her household, but has found reasons not to fulfill them. She has found her own way of making her life her own- even with a husband that she seems to have not much connection to, with a former lover for whom she can still have strong feelings after all these years, and with an unsatisfying daughter who is decidedly not her double in any way. She’s able to make these obligations into a kind of mission and to see the tiny beauty in the every day things that she achieves, or at least to come to see it after a daily struggle with her whole situation that mirrors some of the feelings these other women have, even if she justifies it to herself and thinks through it differently. Her slightly more optimistic conclusion (in its way) about the business of fulfilling her role as a woman and what it can lead to, at its best, does not at all lessen the struggles and doubts and reflections that we see her go through. Her success in repressing them might make her stronger in some ways, but it doesn’t mean that she, like Lady Slane, has seemingly ceased to be a person in the eyes and become only outward show. She maintains her personhood throughout, which is triumph most of these ladies desire to achieve anyway.Of course, the most obvious precursor to all this is the infamous Emma Bovary’s disastrous venture into speculation and dreams, due to her insatiable longing for something more, something higher to believe in than the calling she’s been given as a woman. Anna Karenina has its own piece to share as well, of course, in its way. But these headlong, rush-to-the-head statements, these explosions of joy and rage are screams in the night, almost in a category by themselves, one separate from the whispers, the candlelight dreams and embedded-in-the-everyday transformations that are the rest of these books. Those ladies seek to destroy, to smash, in a way, whereas these ladies seek to simply… exist in a different way. They want to find a way for themselves that is slightly different, not the expected, but not…publicly. These are still private individuals still interested in keeping their privacy and existing within most bounds. They are at most…. Slightly off, in the context of their day, or perhaps in the case of Clarissa Dalloway, not outwardly “off” at all. They are interested in delving into and acting on some specific and long cherished thoughts that are not necessarily radically out of the norm. It is the sort of “odd” that earns you sideways looks from your children and a “Well, I just never thought that you,” or “I just don’t know what you mean by…,” when you push them as to what exactly is wrong. It’s eccentricity, not revolutionary.I think the better predecessors are the more-or-less coded versions of the narrative that we find in Villette and Jane Eyre, and a wistful, painful statement of it through Dorothea in Middlemarch. Charlotte’s versions of it are covered over with the Victorian balm of marriage, of course, in the end. But both Lucy and Jane are interested in the sort of honesty, the sort of “to thine own self be true” that leads so many of the other ladies above to question what it is that they want and why. Villette, especially, offers its audience an ending that is, at best, deeply ambiguous as to whether it is marriage itself (rather than the act of it) that sets Lucy free or not. Her husband will never be any sort of ideal, and the way that he speaks to her has what would politely be called bracing honesty for a virtue. With Jane, of course, while she allows marriage to be more of an ideal achieved for her, the ideal is not achieved until they can meet as both financial and intellectual equals with something both material and spiritual to bring to the marriage, to assure anyone judging them that Jane has something worthwhile to contribute. This echoes Edna’s abandonment of her home and everything her husband ever bought her, her fixation on her husband’s money as the thing that binds her and keeps her in servitude, the same way that Jane refused the finery Rochester offered for their first wedding. Dorothea’s Saint Theresa is a more or less open presentation of a woman with more passion, intelligence and drive to achieve something than the bounds of her life will allow. Like Lolly, her dreams and thoughts of how to conceptualize these capacities inside of her are bounded by the perceptions and assumptions that are presented to her by society. Thus, she dreams of assisting a “Great Man,” of the sort of loving service that Lolly has been condemned to provide, if of a more intellectual sort. When women are encouraged to make ideals of men, to see them as the “superior sex,” those sorts of personalities that are inclined to want the best for themselves, to reach for all life has to offer, will take actions to see that they are a part of that. Her disillusionment is both expected and painful to read about. What is interesting about her is that she actually is a person who wants obligations to fulfill and to provide the sort of self-sacrificial service that women are demanded to provide. She’s begging for it- her problem is that the obligations given to her are not enough. In the end, she too finds happiness in the “better marriage,” that allows her more outlet to take on more obligations and be happy doing it. And yet, her end still leads to one of my favorite expressions of the reasons why feminism exists and is still so necessary:“Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done.”It’s tossed in the middle of a paragraph in the midst of an epilogue that includes the entire main cast- coded, in its own way then and robbed of the end-of-book statement it should have enjoyed, but we still end on Saint Teresa, contemplating the great sacrifices that Dorothea was capable of, and questioning what more she might have achieved without these every day obligations pressing on her.Thus Edna Pontellier had many eloquent sisters saying, painting, singing, and subliminally messaging all the shades of this message for decades before The Awakening gained a wide, or almost any, audience. But she was one of the ones who did it both first and openly (remember again that the Brontes and George Eliot did it in more coded ways, and that Madame Bovary was, after all French and a scandal for decades.) In 1899, while not banned, the book was widely rejected and shunned by the reading public. Libraries refused to carry it. It got mixed reviews, but even the good ones who shied away from prudish or “conventional” condemnation of morality and unorthodox gender roles chose the secondary criticism of those who find it distasteful but realize that to say so would make them look backwards of bourgeois: the condescending complaint that she could have chosen a loftier, better subject for her talents rather than “entering into the overworked field of sex-fiction,” as a writer for the Chicago Times Herald put it. Of course I understand that in 1899 writing about women having any sort of sexual feeling or longing would have made this smut, automatically. But looking at the book from a modern reader’s point of view, I would be hard pressed to call this “sex fiction” of any kind. What I appreciate, and what I think other modern readers may appreciate about this particular iteration of the theme was how honest and free of…. devices, I guess would be the best word, that it was. There were minimal metaphors used to try to describe what she was trying to say, nor was the thing encased in the alternate, inner universe of thought. The book was almost… naïve, childlike, even sentimental about the way that it depicted Edna’s realization and actualization of her freedom. I thought that it was very earnest about trying to just… almost just record a series of moments that added up to Edna’s inability to deny what she had been feeling.Therefore, like these other quiet, figuring-it-out- ladies above, we get to go from her smallest feeling of “oddness” and difference through to her growing desire to act on it. The first major stand-off starts from a desire that Edna has to sleep outside on a hammock on a warm evening, rather than come inside. It is a small thing that increasingly becomes important the harder her husband pushes her on it. Eventually, he joins her outside to smoke his cigar and pretend to anyone watching that this was a communal desire. Slowly, this crushes out any magic her rebellion has until she slowly slips inside. We see her little by little move from stand-offs to the simple refusal to do ever larger things, withdrawing herself by choice from her life, from every thing that does not matter in itself, but, when added up, constitutes the life that she has been living in its entire. I think that this method of doing it was quite powerful, since we get to see all the little things that prick her and needle her into, after years of repetition, making the huge change that she does.Eventually, Edna has a frank conversation with one of her closest friends, trying to explain the essential difference between this woman’s priorities and her own. She finally tells her: “I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”The woman doesn’t understand, and says so, but the important part is that we see Edna trying to think through this and express her own new limits and boundaries and define them as different than others. Which is of course, as we saw above, the real work of becoming a person on your own, rather than an accessory, or someone acting out a defined role for themselves that does not require them to think out their own feelings or desires.This was my favorite part about what Edna’s journey tries to show us. That, sexuality and all, one of the major essences of feminism is, as someone said, that women are people. All Edna is doing in this book is testing out her likes and dislikes, finding friends that she herself enjoys, finding an occupation that fulfills her, and rooting out those things from her life which she does not like or need.I mean, that sounds like college to me. High school, college, my twenties. Edna is twenty-eight and has had really, none of that experience except brief infatuations, conquered quickly. She’s missed out on it all, and this is about her realizing that she has missed out on something. Which, as Chopin eloquently tells us, is more than most women of her class and status get the chance to realize, given the confines, expectations, obligations and, frankly, apparent rewards and the something-like-happiness endings that many are able to achieve, at least according to the script they’ve had since they were little girls: “A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her- the light which, showing the way, forbids [her realization of why she was doing what she was doing]. At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears.In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight- perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually vouchsafed to any woman.But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such a beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!”Do you see what I mean by how straightforward it is?(... continued in the comments).
For such an initially simple and straightforward story this seems well and intriguingly written, conveying initial stirrings of dissatisfaction and desire, the sense that life is less than it might be, that one should be able to have and achieve more, not so much in terms of material objects as in terms of self-actualization, human flourishing, what Aristotle called eudaemonia. Life for Edna is not all that she had hoped it would be, not what she senses that it can be, and she feels limited and stifled in an abstract and ill-defined way. Out of touch with the expectations and conventions of her Louisiana Creole society, of which she has never been a part, she begins to allow herself to drift away, without definitely planning what will happen but content to let life present itself to her. Her imagination wanders, and she allows her life to become half dream. “A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her,— the light which, showing the way, forbids it. (She) was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being.” Chopin’s diction and syntax seem unusual, a dash of French, sometimes a flavor of British. It is hard to put one’s finger on, but there is something odd about it, more than just being written in the English of a century ago. The author is never one to eschew a Latinate word when a simpler one will do, and that sometimes seems out of character with the society in which her characters move. One senses that the novel is not particularly skillfully written, that its primary merit lies in its social message, its portrayal of Edna’s growing discontent and anguish. It has become known as a pivotal work of feminism, that being its real claim to fame.Many of the characters have no names – the octoroon, the lovers, the lady in black with the prayer beads – despite their being mentioned repeatedly. There is a certain formalized anonymity to much of the narrative that mirrors Edna’s estrangement from what she perceives as her own true life. Her life seems both out of her control and passive, and she is at first unable to take responsibility for either it or for her moving beyond it. Does this function in her own mind to absolve her of blame for departing from the expected and conventional? “She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility.” Edna’s despair deepens after Robert leaves for Mexico and she and her husband return from their summer holiday to New Orleans with all its conventionality, social expectations, and routine. She is one of her husband’s prized possessions and he is kind to her in his own way, but his expectations are narrow and conventional. There is no doubt, of course, that this is a feminist novel, but cannot it be seen as more than that? Are there not ways that each of us, male and female alike, are caught in roles, constricted by expectations and demands of society such that we cannot blossom and grow into our full potential and into the individuals we yearn most deeply to be? How does this work differ from, for example, Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina? Edna seems to be seeking not so much a particular romantic alliance as romance in general, not so much a relationship outside her stultifying marriage as something inspiring and dramatic to enter her life, something that will enable her to grow into a being more than what her restricted existence allows. Edna’s infatuation with Robert seems less a personal attraction than a vehicle for the expression of her dissatisfaction with her routine and conventional life. As she increasingly follows her own inclinations, her marriage begins to suffer or at least to suffer in the view of her husband who sees her as neglecting her familial obligations. “She had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.” During her husband’s extended absence on business, Edna decides to move out, a move precipitated by her determination to follow her own desires. “Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to ‘feed upon opinion’ when her own soul had invited her.”On the one hand, Edna’s determination to free herself, to be a free agent answerable to no one else, seems commendable, a move away from and repudiation of the arbitrary demands and restricted roles of her society. On the other hand, to rail against biological necessity, as when her friend is delivered of a baby, seems futile and unproductive except insofar as she, as woman, had (perhaps to only a limited degree at that time, much more so now) the option not to bear children, if that is the option she wanted to take and insisted upon taking. Edna’s wish for a radical individuality, untrammeled by the demands and expectations of others, is in many ways uniquely Western, a product of our culture and its history, and this goes beyond the unique issue of feminism. Some might celebrate this. Others might be concerned that the pendulum has swung too far in this direction. But it is a mistake not to acknowledge it and recognize its influence on this particular perspective, being fully aware that such a perspective is relative and not absolute. Ultimately it is impossible to live a life totally oriented around oneself, because the self is a construct with vital communitarian dimensions. To deny this is to deny the very self that one attempts to reify. That is a fundamental dilemma. “Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life." Maybe this sentence is a key to understanding the story. Maybe Edna’s dilemma is her inability to see her actual situation as being in part a function of limited vision, and maybe clear vision is desirable and even necessary for wholeness and human flourishing even if it does not remove the suffering of what is and perhaps must be.As the people in her life fail her through their inability to understand her experience, Edna stands on the beach and has a premonitory vision: “The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.” This is a thought-provoking novella, worth having read.
What do You think about The Awakening (2015)?
My opinion of this book is greatly influenced by my own life experiences, more so than most anything else I've read, as I relate to the character in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable, just not in the cheating and complete hussy-like behavior.I'm sure that all mothers at one time or another feel trapped by their children. But even during times of complete insanity, good mothers would not change the fact that they have children, would not sacrifice their children for anything. To me, Edna emb
—Kathryn
A woman awakens. Edna Pontellier, like Eve, awakens to the knowledge of desire--she awakens to the knowledge that she is not free. Before the end, she awakens to the knowledge that freedom will be expensive but resolves to pay the price. “The artist must possess the brave soul. The soul that dares and defies.” Patriots warn us that -- “freedom isn’t free!” Kate Chopin tested the limits of our acceptance of the consequences of that slogan in the dilemma of Edna Pontellier, who lives in New Orleans at the end of the 19th Century with her two children and with her husband, a respected merchant. At the water’s edge, Edna awakens to the fact that she must battle for her happiness, solitude, and freedom.“This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight—perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman. But the beginning of things, of a world especially is necessarily tangled, chaotic and exceedingly disturbing.”I must reveal the ending of this novel in the course of this review, for those of you inclined to leave this review now, I encourage you to read this book and to be gracious to Mrs. Pontellier for the choices she makes. ***************The Gulf of Mexico awakens Edna. “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” Edna overcomes her fear of water—and life. She wades out into the Gulf and unto that gulf she returns nine months later and allows it to swallow her. I see the question posed by other reviews, “How could she abandon her children?” It is a fair question--one that is often asked of suicides. Edna states, “I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.” Kate Chopin treats Edna sympathetically. “Who can tell what metals the gods use in forging the subtle bond which we call sympathy, which we might as well call love.” Chopin was a Catholic when the Church still taught that suicide involved automatic excommunication and eternal damnation (a doctrine dropped because the Church now understands that many people who kill themselves act under compulsion and lack the necessary volition [free choice] to resist.) Is this a feminist novel? A novel of passion? Of the artist’s journey? Of mental illness? Is it chauvinistic to attribute a woman’s seeking of freedom with mental illness (e.g., “being crazy”—“hysterical”)? Is it possible to approach the text in a way that accommodates all of these perspectives and to remain faithful to Chopin’s vision of Edna? Are depression and suicide moral weaknesses? (I think not), or is depression a disease that ravishes like cancer--without regard to the righteousness of the individual? (Ye, I think it does.) ”There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.”Mr. Pontellier is a gentle chauvinist--a kindly but conventional man who expects his wife to adhere to the social code. “Mr. Pontellier had been a rather courteous husband so long as he met with a certain tacit submissiveness in his wife.” Yet, Chopin does not portray him as unpleasantly as we might expect a man to be treated in a novel categorized as “feminist.” Her husband is not an ogre. He does not bellow, berate, or beat her. We have encountered far worse than Mr. Pontellier. Edna's oppression is cultural, emotional, undefined, and understated.Indeed, many women would consider Edna to have been extraordinarily privileged. Today’s single mother, working two jobs for subsistence income, might gladly exchange places with her. Today’s career woman, free of the encumbrances of husband and children, may have even less freedom than Edna due to the demands of her bosses and her profession. What of Doctor Mandalet’s advice to Mr. Pontellier? “Woman my dear friend is a very peculiar and delicate organism. It would require an inspired psychologist to deal successfully with them. And when ordinary fellows like yourself and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling.” The genius of Kate Chopin, in “The Awakening,” is that Edna speaks to us differently. I am not persuaded that I understand the novel, Edna, or Chopin. Great fiction, like life, is “tangled, chaotic and exceedingly disturbing.” I do understand that Enda Pontellier awakens my curiosity, my love, and and my compassion. The reader must “possess the brave soul. The soul that dares and defies.” I dare to surrender to the tide and to be awakened. March 30, 2013
—Steve Sckenda
Bear with me: when I watched the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven I felt like Eastwood was ending an entire genre. This is tired, said Clint, its beats are tired, its cliches are tired, there's nothing more for it to say, I'm gonna give you one last great Western and that's enough, okay? And the movie had such overwhelming eulogic power that it almost succeeded.(It didn't, of course, but it was years before anyone dared to make another one.)And I got the same feeling from The Awakening. I felt that it was hammering the nails into the coffin of a genre - the genre of novels that end the way Awakening ends, which is sortof a startling lot of books. With this mixture of irritation and love - "I'm sick to death of this stupid story" but also, "And here's one more great story." That to me is its brilliance: it tells a familiar story, but it's simultaneously furious at the very story it's telling, at the world it's telling it in, and when it ends it intends not to end this specific story but this entire story, the telling of this story, the existence of it.It didn't work either. But A for effort! We all got it coming, kid.
—Alex
