“Every bond is a bond to sorrow”

James Duffy’s pronouncement, “Every bond is a bond to sorrow,” gives a severe, almost aphoristic name to the separation he arranges with Mrs Sinico. It sounds like a general law, but in context it is also an instrument of withdrawal: Duffy turns the pain and uncertainty of intimacy into a reason to end it, then returns to a life organized around keeping attachment at a distance.

The Sentence in Context

Duffy and Mrs Sinico had often spent evenings alone at her cottage outside Dublin. Their conversations gradually moved from remote subjects toward more intimate ones, and their companionship altered him: he felt that it softened his character and made his mental life more emotional. Yet he also heard, in what he recognized as his own impersonal voice, the insistence that the soul is incurably lonely and that people cannot give themselves to one another.

The crisis came when Mrs Sinico passionately caught Duffy’s hand and pressed it to her cheek. Surprised by what he understood as her interpretation of his words, he stopped visiting for a week, then asked to meet. To avoid the influence of their “ruined confessional,” they chose a little cakeshop near the Parkgate. After walking together through the Park for nearly three hours, they agreed to end their intercourse. Duffy’s maxim supplies the compressed rationale for that decision: a bond, in his formulation, does not promise comfort but leads to sorrow.

Meaning and Consequence

The sentence’s balanced repetition makes it sound settled and impersonal. Rather than naming his own fear or responding to Mrs Sinico’s gesture as a particular human moment, Duffy casts attachment itself as the source of suffering. The formulation thus carries both the force of a principle and the chill of an evasion: it closes discussion by treating separation as the inevitable consequence of connection.

The aftermath gives the maxim its human cost. When Mrs Sinico trembled violently as they left the Park, Duffy feared she might collapse, but he bade her goodbye quickly and left. A few days later, a parcel containing his books and music arrived. Four years passed; he resumed his even routine, kept away from concerts lest he encounter her, and continued to live amid the order that marked his room. His sentence about bonds therefore anticipates not a freedom from sorrow but a life narrowed in order to avoid the risks of intimacy.