Someone else's misfortune is a swift kick from a horse

The Expression and Its Context

The phrase "Someone else's misfortune is a swift kick from a horse" functions as a grim folk maxim within the narrator's internal monologue. It surfaces at the end of a disturbing pastoral scene in which the narrator and her husband witness cows being separated from their calves. The bovine mothers raise a massive commotion, mooing until they grow hoarse and doing everything they can to resist, yet their babies are taken away just the same. The narrator watches this spectacle with a strange blend of sympathy and detachment, waving goodbye to the calves and wishing them bon voyage.

The Scene's Structure and Irony

The expression lands with deliberate irony. Moments earlier, the narrator has been describing herself as "a startled deer, a sad, sensitive deer," pressing her fists into her eye sockets and wondering what the point of crying is. She has been led blindly through tall vegetation by her husband, who compares her nonstop speech to a car alarm and tells her it is unbearable. The scene shifts abruptly from this intimate cruelty to the public spectacle of the cows' grief, and the proverb serves as a bridge between the two forms of suffering. The narrator's casual wave and farewell to the calves — "See you later, calves," she says — enact the very callousness the proverb describes, even as the image of the stunned cows by the roadside lingers with genuine pathos.

The Proverb's Role in the Marriage

The expression also illuminates the strange dynamic between the narrator and her husband. Immediately after the cows are taken away, the couple goes home together with their arms around each other, singing a catchy little ditty: "why oh why, tell me why could it be, that when a cow's tied up, her calf won't leave." The narrator declares, "We love each other so much." The juxtaposition is jarring: the same woman who feels the cows' loss keenly enough to wave them goodbye also finds in their misfortune a source of shared amusement with the man who has just humiliated her. The proverb thus captures the couple's bond as one built on a mutual, almost conspiratorial enjoyment of others' pain — a bond that coexists with, and perhaps depends on, the cruelty they inflict on each other.

Thematic Significance

The proverb distills the novel's broader meditation on the ethics of looking away. It appears in a book saturated with images of animal suffering and human indifference — the narrator's own ambivalence toward motherhood, her husband's casual sadism, the family's rituals of denial. The phrase "a swift kick from a horse" suggests both suddenness and inevitability: misfortune arrives like a blow from an animal, unpredictable yet somehow expected. The narrator's willingness to reduce another's tragedy to a proverb, to sing a cheerful song about a cow's separation from her calf, mirrors the way the novel's characters repeatedly aestheticize or trivialize pain in order to survive it. The expression is not merely a cynical aside but a survival mechanism — a way of converting unbearable empathy into manageable distance. That the narrator can hold this cynicism and her own declared sensitivity as "a sad, sensitive deer" in the same breath is the paradox the proverb exists to contain.