The Maltese Falcon

Last night I took a break from my work and because I felt like reading for pleasure. I miss that. I don't get to do that a lot at Pencey because it's such hard work. I was up all night reading, and I finished it. It was a great story; I heard the movie was pretty good too. But what I liked best about it was this part that Hammett put in Chapter 7. After his partner Archer dies, Spade tells this story to Brigid O'Shaughnessy about a guy named "Flitcraft".

"Here's what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up- just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk along side him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn't touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger-- well, affectionately- when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works."

So I thought that was pretty crazy, and the best part about it is that the narrative completely pauses for Spade to tell this story. Directly, it has NOTHING to do with the rest of the novel. Then he goes on to talk about Flitcraft:

"Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between offive and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam.

It was not, primarily, the injustice that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a fallen beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

He went to Seattle that afternoon, and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then driftede back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. He wasn't sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don't think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

And that's it. Then it goes back to the rest of the story. At first it kind of bothered me because I felt like it was just Hammett putting out a soap box for himself to preach on. But the more I read it the more it really spoke to me. If things can just end that quickly, then why do we bother getting stuck in any patterns?

What do you think??