It takes a death sometimes to make us all live a bit more, Iris says.
And then what happened next, well, it happened next, and history, that other word for irony, went its own foul witty way, sang its own foul witty ditty, and the girl was the one who died young in this story.
We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time, Sophia thinks.
She has found by experience that she is in a world where female emancipation is a password and not a fact – she is beautiful, therefore she should not be clever.
Even the machine has to encounter nature, not even it can escape the earth. There’s something reassuring in that.
Daniel in the gallery sees one of her hands, the one on the rail of the witness box, cover itself in little shoots and buds. The buds split open. There are leaves coming out of her fingers.
But pure joy! He’d forgotten what it feels like, to feel. To feel even just the thought of one’s own bared self near someone else’s beauty.
You can’t stop change, the man says. It comes of necessity. You have to go with it and make something of what it makes of you.
To be included in someone’s absence, it is an honour, and it asks quiet. It asks respect.
A missed chance, a ruined life.
It was kindly meant. But kindly meant was complicated. There were lines you had to draw. There were correct responses. On the one hand there was laugh and say something funny back, on the other there was how dare you talk to me like that. It depended.
On the contrary, time and space are what lace us all up together, Hannah says. What makes us part of the larger picture. Universally speaking. The problem is, we tend to think we’re separate. But it’s a delusion.
Change is the nature of luck.
The surface of things is a lie, and everybody who sees the hoarding for what they are knows it.
It’s why he’d got off the train here: the train had pulled towards this station and there’d been something clean about the mountains, clean like swept clean. They had something about them that accepted the fact of themselves, demanded nothing. They just were.
She came right up to the side of the building as if she were coming round its corner and simply sort of reading the sign because that’s what she was, a girl reading the world.
Crying came out of her like weather.
What I do when it distresses me that there’s something I can’t remember, is. Are you listening? Yes, Elisabeth said through the crying. I imagine that whatever it is I’ve forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird. What kind of bird? Elisabeth said. A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You’ll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it too tight, and I let it sleep. And that’s that.
They’re called rollerblades, she said. Rollerblades, Daniel said. Right. Well? And you can’t rollerblade on grass, she said. Can’t you? Daniel said. How very disappointing truth is sometimes. Can’t we try? There’d be no point, she said. Can’t we try anyway? he said. We might disprove the general consensus. Okay, Elisabeth said.
Well, that’s one reading of it, Elisabeth says. My own preferred reading is: free spirit arrives on earth equipped with the skill and the vision capable of blasting the tragic stuff that happens to us all into space, where it dissolves away to nothing whenever you pay any attention to the lifeforce in her pictures.