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'nothing was of any value without him'
Anne, in her darkest hour of losing the boy who loved her, the boy she had secretly loved all along, suddenly understood the meaning of life, what we stay alive for - with the ensuing existential dilemma:
Anne Of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery (1985)
“Oh, the black years of emptiness stretching before her!”
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"There is a book of Revelation in every one's life, as there is in the Bible… She loved Gilbert -- had always loved him! She knew that now. She knew that she could no more cast him out of her life without agony than she could have cut off her right hand and cast it from her… If she had not been so blind -- so foolish -- she would have had the right to go to him now. But he would never know that she loved him -- he would go away from this life thinking that she did not care. Oh, the black years of emptiness stretching before her! She could not live through them -- she could not! … Nothing was of any value without him. She belonged to him and he to her. In her hour of supreme agony she had no doubt of that… Oh, what a fool she had been not to realize what the bond was that had held her to Gilbert... And now she must pay for her folly as for a crime.”
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Editor’s note: Being out-of-phase with another, failing to tell the one you love just how you feel, is somewhat of a universal problem.
See the story of “the Palm Sunday Maiden,” Mary Lyttleton. She did not confess to her beloved, Arthur Balfour, who later became British Prime Minister (1902 - 1906), her truest feelings, and then, when illness suddenly took her from the Earth, she spent the next many decades, desperately, trying to get a message through to her skeptical fiance.
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