London is a language. I guess all places are.
What do you do when you’re visiting someone’s house and their garden starts vanishing?
For most of my life, the world shrank and technology progressed; this was the natural order of things. Few of us clocked on that “the natural order of things” is entirely man-made, and that a world that kept expanding as technology regressed was not only possible but waiting in the wings.
A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.
Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he’d just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.
Books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them.
She has four sons,” Nurse Purvis leads me on, “all with a London post code, but they never visit. You’d think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we’re all heading to.” I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.
Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small?
If people praise you, you’re not walking your own path.
Look around. Walk. Find a cheap bed. Eat what the locals eat. Find a cheap beer. Try not to get fleeced. Talk. Pick up a few words in the local lingo. Just BE there, y’know? Sometimes,” Brubeck bites into an apple, “Sometimes I want to be everywhere, all at once, so badly I could just... Do you ever get that feeling?
If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world.
Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going.
The secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty.
If we could read the script of the future, we’d never turn the page.
You look for your meaning. You find it, and at that moment, your meaning changes, and you have to start all over again.
If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.
In the corridor outside, a trolley squeaks by. The brigadier I knew has left his bombed-out face, leaving me alone with the clock, shelves of handsome books nobody ever reads, and one certainty: that whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge, or beauty I’ll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man. When I look at Brigadier Reginald Philby, I’m looking down time’s telescope at myself.
But reality creeps in wherever you live, however pretty the flowers are, however blue the sky, however great the parties. The only people who actually live in dreams are people in comas.
The media – and not just The Washington Post – is where democracies conduct their civil wars.
Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose.