Jesus no, he said. I fucking hate the place. But they wouldn't be paying me to do something I liked, would they? That's the thing about work, if it was any good you'd do it for free. [5]
. . .
To this he offered no reply at all, just nodded, with a vaguely grim expression of forbearance, as if this aspect of her personality, her tendency to be 'witty' and verbose, was, after an hour or two of conversation, a quality he had noted and determined to ignore. [8]
. . .
What kind of people do you write about, people like you? [13]
. . .
This idea is so basic that when I first thought of it, I felt very brilliant, and then I wondered if I was an idiot. [16]
. . .
And frankly if we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven't deserved this life or even enjoyed it. But I would like to be helpful in some way to the project, whatever it is, and if I could help only in a very small way, I wouldn't mind, because I would be acting in my own self-interest anyway — because it's also ourselves we're brutalising, though in another way, of course. No one wants to live like this. Or at least, I don't want to live like this.I want to live differently, or if necessary to die so that other people can one day live differently. But looking at the internet, I don't see many ideas worth dying for. [74-75]
. . .
The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the 'main characters' of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel's protagonists, when it's happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together — if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything. [95-96]
. . .
And isn't death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call 'breaking up or staying together' (!), because at the end of our lives, when there's nothing left in front of us, it's still the only thing we want to talk about. Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying.
. . .
[A]bout sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive — because we are so stupid about each other. [111-112]
. . .
I know I keep saying how ordinary he was, but it was precisely the seeming absence of any change in his personhood, precisely the fact that he went on being fully and recognisably the same man as always, that was so mystifying to me. [114]
. . .
What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal — the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always — just to live and be with other people? [161]
. . .
Was I really like that once? A person capable of dropping down into the most fleeting of impressions, and dilating them somehow, dwelling inside them, and finding riches and beauty there. [163]
. . .
In public I'm always talking about care ethics and the value of human community, but in my real life I don't take on the work of caring for anyone except myself. [186]
. . .
However: Jesus teaches us not to judge. I can't approve of unforgiving puritanism or of moral vanity, but I am hardly perfect in either regard. All my mania for culture, for 'really good' things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, what if it's all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins? I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it's impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all. And I look back across that gulf, not with a sense of guilt or loss, but with relief and satisfaction. Am I better than they are? Certainly not, although maybe luckier. But I am different, and I don't understand them very well, and I can't live with them or draw them into my inner world - or for that matter write about them. All my filial duties are nothing but a series of rituals on my part designed to shield myself from criticism while giving nothing of myself away. It was touching what you said in your last message about our civilisation collapsing andlife going on afterwards. And yet I can't imagine my life that way — I mean whatever goes on, it won't be my life anymore, not really. Because in my deepest essence I am just an artefact of our culture, just a little bubble winking at the brim of our civilisation. And when it's gone, I'll be gone. Not that I think I mind. [187]
. . .
When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I don't think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. [209]
. . .
When I was younger, I think what I wanted was to travel the world, to lead a glamorous life, to be celebrated for my work, to marry a great intellectual, to reject everything I had been raised with, to cut myself off from the narrow world. I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn't understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness. [233]
. . .
In a funny way maybe it's not important to get along, and more important just to love each other anyway. [248]
. . .
On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing after a separation of several months. Behind them, a tall fair-haired man alighting from the train carrying two suitcases. The women unspeaking, their eyes closed tight, their arms wrapped around one another, for a second, two seconds, three. Were they aware, in the intensity of their embrace, of something slightly ridiculous about this tableau, something almost comical, as someone nearby sneezed violently into a crumpled tissue; as a dirty discarded plastic bottle scuttled along the platform under a breath of wind; as a mechanised billboard on the station wall rotated from an advertisement for hair products to an advertisement for car insurance; as life in its ordinariness and even ugly vulgarity imposed itself everywhere all around them? Or were they in this moment unaware, or something more than unaware — were they somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world? [250]
. . .
At first I thought: a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally inferior, and the more books you read, the better you are than everyone else. But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity. An example of someone who genuinely believes that because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, she knows me personally - and in fact knows better than I do what is best for my life. And it's normal! It's normal for her not only to think these bizarre thoughts privately, but to express them in public, and receive positive feedback and attention as a result. She has no idea that she is, in this small limited respect, quite literally insane, because everyone around her is also insane in exactly the same way. They really cannot tell the difference between someone they have heard of, and someone they personally know. And they believe that the feelings they have about this person they imagine me to be — intimacy, resentment, hatred, pity — are as real as the feelings they have about their own friends. It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion. Like a malignant growth where the sacred used to be. [327-328]
. . .
Goodness regardless of reward, regardless of our own desires, regardless of whether anyone is watching or anyone will know. If that's God, then Felix says fine, it's just a word, it means nothing. And of course it doesn't mean heaven and angels and the resurrection of Christ — but maybe those things can help in some way to put us in touch with what it does mean. That most of our attempts throughout human history to describe the difference between right and wrong have been feeble and cruel and unjust, but that the difference still remains — beyond ourselves, beyond each specific culture, beyond every individual person who has ever lived or died. And we spend our lives trying to know that difference and to live by it, trying to love other people instead of hating them, and there is nothing else that matters on the earth. [330]
. . .
But that's not what I am anymore, if I ever was. And life is more changeable than I thought. [336]
