It is to endure

“It is to endure” is Emma Harte’s final answer to Blackie when he asks what she learned on her quest for power and wealth. The phrase closes the novel by distilling her experience into a principle of persistence: after a life marked by struggle and loss, endurance is what she offers her old friend as the secret of life.

Wording and Meaning

The expression is brief and declarative. Emma first says that she believes she learned the secret of life; when Blackie asks what it is, she looks at him for a prolonged moment, smiles, and answers, “It is to endure.” The wording does not promise triumph or ease. It makes continuing through hardship the essential knowledge she has gained.

The phrase also has a shorter form, “To endure,” which preserves its central idea while omitting the complete sentence’s emphasis on endurance as an answer to a larger question. In the exchange itself, Emma’s words are not presented as an abstract maxim detached from experience: Blackie has just described the extraordinary road she travelled in pursuit of power and wealth, and the question invites her to draw meaning from that journey.

The Closing Exchange

The expression appears in the book’s final scene. Blackie returns and sits beside Emma on the sofa, and they clink glasses in a toast to those they have loved and lost, those they have loved and kept, and those yet to be born. Emma joins him in raising the toast to the next generation. This movement between remembrance, present companionship, and future life gives her later answer its immediate setting.

They sit together in silence, as at ease with one another as they had been since their first meeting on the moors above Fairley village. Blackie takes Emma’s hand and asks whether, across her pursuit of power and wealth, she discovered anything special that she would want to share with an old friend. Emma’s response follows a small but deliberate pause: she gazes back at him, smiles, and gives the final words of the novel. The intimacy of the scene makes the expression an act of sharing between longstanding friends, not a public declaration.

Significance

The phrase gathers the closing scene’s contrasts into a single answer. The toast acknowledges loss as well as enduring bonds, while its reference to those not yet born opens the moment toward the future. Against that span of lives and generations, Emma names endurance as what her own journey has taught her. The novel ends not with a further pursuit of wealth or power, but with her account of what matters after that pursuit: the capacity to persist and remain connected to others.