Barrie in Love IX

Barrie in Love IX

Barrie realizes that his writing is finished and that it had been a mistake to interfere in the souls of others.

He knows now that his reach ends in his fingertips. His love for mankind had been no more than a form of egotism, a madness that would devour multitudes while leaving his own being untouched and virginal.

What is crucified in him is his passion for "saving" others. Peter Pan doesn’t need saving and neither does Captain Hook. Nor do the Lost Boys need saving either.

Barrie had explored the near dissolution of his personality in Peter Pan—the deepening sense of nothingness after losing the Davies boys.

Now Barrie was dead, he’d died with Michael. The man who had died wakes slowly and reluctantly to life, overcome with a sense of nausea, dreading consciousness but compelled to return to it and to his fulfillment as a human being.

The passage back to life is a terrible one; his injured body is repulsive to him, as is the memory of his suffering. The analogy between the colorful cock that was Peter Pan and the gradually healing flesh of the man who had died is unabashedly direct and even rather witty.