Elle Muse blog2 "the other side of the hedge"

Last year I had this brilliant idea to buy a book on short stories, little did I know the impact these stories would carry into my own life. “The other side of the hedge” is written by an English writer and was published in 1947. The story opens to the main character that has collapsed on the side of the road that he has been walking on for quite some time and plans on continuing this lifeless road for an amount of time that is seemingly endless. On either sides of the road there is a hedge in which our runner finally become curious enough to venture through, upon getting through the hedge he finds a world much different from that of which he had just left. This new territory was filled with lively meadows and people whose paths didn’t seem to have a direction at all. He meets a man who he walks with in these meadows who shows him two gates back to the road he has come from, by the end of the story however the runner never actually makes it back to the road.

“My pedometer told me that I was twenty-five” this is the first sentence of the story and already the runner has put us in an awkward understand of his perception of reality. A pedometer as we know is a device in which counts your steps, this device isn’t really in the business of telling time. The runner is implying that his life is completely made up of the steps he has taken. From further reading you will find that in the past the runner has stopped or even slowed down so in these moments, it begs the question, does time for him stop at these moments, moreover when he is not creating movement.

“Now it was the monotony of the highway that oppressed me now- dust under foot and brown crackling hedges on either side, ever since I could remember” there are definitely at least 2 meaning that I can find in this line. First there are his feelings about this road he is traveling that yes literally it is getting oppressing and monotonous, but the irony is that when he makes it to the other side of the hedge his describes the sky, the trees, and the grass as a “prison, for all its beauty and extent”. The statements again leave the reader with questions, like what does he want yes the road-this forever forward moving thing- is oppressing and even monotonous, but the meadows- without direction- are imprisoning to him. This monotonous road is he speaks of can also represent the road of life in which he has been on up until this point. This brought me back to something that one of my favorite authors once said. While talking about his experience with becoming an adult, He had said that adult life at times can feel like “paralyzing monotony”, moreover that we tend to live in a constant fear that if we ever screw up this monotonous adult life we create, that we will end up changing the course of our lives entirely. He wrapped it up by saying that in the end the monotony is just a period of time and that there is an end. So again I wonder, says that, this monotony though oppressing does it actually outweigh the directionless land in which he has stumbled upon.  The draw of this monotonous road is once again questioned when the runner sees a women by the name of Miss Eliza Dimbleby who had on the road encouraged him to move forward when he had stopped from exhaustion on the side of the road. Even the people who had previously been encouraging him on this road were now in this place on the other side of the hedge. Finally the journey of the road is questioned in the very end, “the man whose beer I had stolen lowered me down gently to sleep off its effects, and, as he did so, I saw that he was my brother”. So his brother who he had left as he said 1 or 2 years before on the road had also become a man of the meadows and not of the road. So where should the Runner go, back to the road or stay here in the meadow of green. 

i feel like i'm totally off base i really need some feed back, thank you.