The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, July 31, 2026

Byblos: If I could have Edith Wharton’s babies, I would, though she justifiably would never have so much as my florid breath. “The Moving Finger” is a 1901 story about loss and the attempted recovery of the departed. It begins with one of Wharton’s superb lines: “The news of Mrs. Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder—one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism.” Mrs. Grancy was young. She was the second wife of Ralph Grancy. It was a happy marriage. “Some human happiness is a landlocked lake; but the Grancys’ was an open sea, stretching a buoyant and illimitable surface to the voyaging interests of life.” She’d left him a portrait of hers, but its youthful brilliance oppressed him after five years–not because he resented it, but because he had aged, and he felt he was deceiving her by letting the difference persist. So he has his friend Claydon, the painter who authored the portrait, age Mrs. Grancy. Claydon does so reluctantly. The narrator is incensed that he would have done it at all, but Ralph insists: the aged portrait makes him happier: “If he felt her presence it was evidently as an enveloping medium, the moral atmosphere in which he breathed. I had never before known how completely the dead may survive.” We all do what we can to cope with the death of a friend, a spouse, a parent. We think computer-assisted aging technology is of our time. Wharton shows us how and presumptuous we can be. Life is not just physical. It is mostly memory (were we really alive in the human, sentient, conscious sense, when we were infants? When we were in the womb? Isn’t it Locke who said that life begins with memory?) Grancy found a different way of communing with his wife, to his friend’s (the narrator) horror: “I stood speechless, my gaze travelling from his worn grief- beaten features to the painted face above. It was not furrowed like his; but a veil of years seemed to have descended on it. The bright hair had lost its elasticity, the cheek its clearness, the brow its light: the whole woman had waned.” Then it was Grancy’s turn to die. Claydon claims the portrait. Claydon restores the portrait to its original youthfulness, which again horrifies the narrator, though here we find out that the painter had been in love with Mrs. Grancy all along, and this was his way finally to possess her. “How could I?” he retorted. “How could I not? Doesn’t she belong to me now?” Memory, like time, is not something any of us can control or entirely possess. We are how we are perceived, how we are remembered, so much more than how we have really lived. It reminds me of a line from such an entirely different book and century that I read this morning, by the French 18th century pornographer Godard de Beauchamps: “No matter what we do to clearly know the truth, we will never see it except through a veil.”

“Well-when he came home and sent for me to change the picture it was like asking me to commit murder. He wanted me to make an old woman of her-of her who had been so divinely, unchangeably young! As if any man who really loved a woman would ask her to sacrifice her youth and beauty for his sake! At first I told him I couldn’t do it-but afterward, when he left me alone with the picture, something queer happened. I suppose it was because I was always so confoundedly fond of Grancy that it went against me to refuse what he asked. Anyhow, as I sat looking up at her, she seemed to say, ‘I’m not yours but his, and I want you to make me what he wishes.’ And so I did it. I could have cut my hand off when the work was done-I daresay he told you I never would go back and look at it. He thought I was too busy-he never understood.

–From Edith Wharton’s “The Moving Finger” (1901).

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