At the end of “Never Let Me Go,” I just felt profound sadness. That they knew and accepted their fate - that it was inevitable. They were brainwashed, really into accepting self-sacrifice. This novel and both “Klara and the Sun” and “The Remains of the Day” have self-sacrifice at their heart.
West with the Night by Beryl Markham.
A writer Hemingway admired. The book is a memoir of living with her father in British Kenya on a horse farm. Then learning to fly a small plane as a bush pilot.
This passage is aching with nostalgia for what was and can’t go back to.
"I learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep - leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that a hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.
I left the farm at Njoro almost the slowest way, and I never saw it again."