I’d laughed when I’d seen Walter Benjamin’s name, because, much like my brother used to shout when we were kids in the back of the car and we were driving south, Ten points to the first person who can see the Forth Road Bridge, or my father when he was teaching me to drive, Ten points if you can hit that woman crossing the road, what you used to say when you’d make me come with you to those boring conferences was, Ten points to the first person who hears someone say the words Walter Benjamin.
It was now free of obviousness.
It’s quite like the songwriter actually couldn’t be bothered to think of words... It will be precisely why the song sold so many copies and was such a big deal at the time. People like things not to be too meaningful.
Elisabeth skims the day’s paper on her phone to catch up on the usual huge changes there’ve been in the last half hour.
As he said it Mark, belted in in the back seat, had watched the holy water glint inside the plastic bubble next to the Virgin Mary and had wondered if the holy water was selective too, and if that’s what God was these days, and whether everybody now simply had a private god who sanctioned his or her own choices.
She stops to make a note on her phone: abandon and presence, she writes. It’s the first time she’s felt like herself for quite some time.
Regrets when you’re dead? A past when you’re dead? Is there never any escaping the junkyard of the self?
Yes, but everywhere needs some defence against people just coming in and overrunning the place with their terrorisms or their deficiencies, eh, sweetheart, Richard says. That’s right, Terence says. Got to keep all those bad refugees out. The ones looking for a better life. Couldn.
Hello, he said. What you reading? Elisabeth showed him her empty hands. Does it look like I’m reading anything? she said. Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.
Invisible links like these were running between all of the people in the room that day, like they always are, like thin strands of light you couldn’t see but you knew were there regardless.
The thing is, Iphis and Ianthe had actually, for real, very really, fallen in love. Did their hearts hurt? I said. Did they think they were underwater all the time? Did they feel scoured by light? Did they wander about not knowing what to do with themselves?
I could lick it off with my tongue, if I had a tongue again, if my tongue was wet, and I could taste it for what it is. Beautiful dirt, grey and vintage, the grime left by life, sticking to the bony roof of a mouth and tasting of next to nothing, which is always better than nothing.
It isn’t that kind of relationship,” Elisabeth says to a lover. “It isn’t even the least physical. It never has been. But it’s love. I can’t pretend it isn’t.
I love your kiss. Everything’s sorted, and obvious, and understood, and civilised, your kiss says. It’s a shut-eye lie, I know it is, because the music I didn’t know before I knew you makes me open my eyes in a place of no sentimentality, where light itself is a kind of shadow, where everything is fragment-slanted.
The slightness of it gestures against the odds. It is like a magic spell.
I have always believed in not compromising the form the drama takes by underestimating what its natural potential offers.
She was so adolescent. Everything about her asked for attention, the way she walked across a room or a shop or across the forecourt of a petrol station, leaning into the air in front of her as if about to lose her balance, mutely demanding that someone – Eve, who else? – put out the flat of her hand and let Astrid push her forehead or her shoulder into it.
THERE was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house the people who were giving the dinner party.
He also knows he is and will be being recorded by CCTV cameras on both sides of the station. He knows these are the kinds of cameras that don’t know anything, don’t show anything beyond surface. He knows that what they do is the stupid new way of knowing everything.
Imagine if people decided at birth never ever to throw away any of the shoes they wore over the whole course of a life, and had a special cupboard where they kept all these old shoes they’d walked about the world in. What would there be in such a shoe museum, when you opened its doors? Row upon row, perfectly preserved, the exact shapes we took at certain points in our lives? Or row upon row, rack upon rack, of nothing but old soiled leather, old stale smell?