She thinks about the students she taught who graduate this week to all that debt, and now to a future in the past.
I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling.
More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities. Bernice.
I penetrated to the heart of the forest, he says, sacrificed myself, and brought back – you. He.
Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling. But.
She knew it was supposed to happen like that, that although these photographs were a signal to the eyes about something really happening, the more she looked at them the less she felt or thought. The more pictures she saw, the less they meant something that had happened to real people and the more it became possible to pile real people up like that again anywhere you wanted and have your picture taken standing smiling behind them.
And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we’d still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we’ve forgotten we even know it.
Once it would have been a year’s worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.
This is part empathy, part thievery. Empathy, in art, is art’s part-exchange with us, its inclusivity, at once a kindness, a going beyond the self, and a pickpocketing of our responses, which is why giving and taking are bound up with the goods, with the gods, with respect, with deep-seated understanding about the complex cultural place where kindness, thievery, bartering, and gift-giving all meet, make their exchanges, and by exchange reveal real worth.
The nights are sooner, chillier, the light a little less each time.
One might imagine it’d be unpleasant, being sealed inside a tree. One might imagine, ah, pining. But the scent lightens despair. It’s perhaps a little like wearing a coat of armour except much nicer, because the armour is made of a substance through which the years themselves, formative, have run.
Never mind literal climate change, there’s been a whole seasonal shift. It’s like walking in a blizzard all the time just trying to get to what’s really happening beyond the noise and hype.
An idiolect. That’s what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He’s been too blithe, he’d forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.
She is reading whatever it is very assiduously.
All of this information flashes through George’s head in that fraction of a second it takes to do the single swivel round towards H in her mother’s chair and say the words: It’s my mother’s study. Cool, H says.
Meanwhile, days pass.
The new house is really big, so big that you can go from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom and there are still other places to go in it.
And now for our entertainment when we want humiliation we’ve got reality TV instead, Iris says. And soon instead of reality TV we’ll have the President of the United States.
It was huge, the room, her mother told her, with nothing in it but thousands of old sherry glasses piled inside each other. Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility, Zoe says. One kick. Disaster. Careful where you tread.
It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.