... having been breathed out

More would not swear; then what could he do but die? What could he do but splash to the scaffold, on a day in July when the torrents never stopped, except for a brief hour in the evening and that too late for Thomas More; he died with his hose wet, splashed to the knees, and his feet paddling like a duck’s. [Cromwell] doesn’t exactly miss the man. It’s just that sometimes, he forgets he’s dead. It’s as if they’re deep in conversation, and suddenly the conversation stops, he says something and no answer comes back. As if they’d been walking along and More had dropped into a hole in the road, a pit as deep as a man, slopping with rainwater.

—Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

Predictably, given my John Maynard Keynes/Lytton Strachey fixation, one of my favorite parts of Mantel’s Wolf Hall is the way she plays with the relationship between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. They are both cruel thugs in their different ways; both willing to hurt others for what they think of as the greater good; both larger-than-life; More’s star setting as Cromwell’s rises. Their respective worldviews are so fundamentally opposed that neither man can fully conceptualize the other’s perspective, which makes their scenes together (or the times when Cromwell thinks about More, before or after his death) just crackle with interest. And this passage from Bring Up the Bodies, in which Cromwell thinks about More after his death, raises interesting questions about the effect that kind of antagonistic yet richly complex dialogue can play in a person’s life over time.