But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it’s simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.
Sometimes when there’s been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over.
Maybe sometimes – the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?
It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.
Still with real greatness, there’s a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn’t matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It’s the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.
From his genial cursing, his infrequent shaving, the relaxed way he talked around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, it was almost as if he were playing a character: some cool guy from a fifties noir or maybe Ocean’s Eleven, a lazy, sated gangster with not much to lose. Yet even in the midst of his new laid-backness he still had that crazed and slightly heroic look of schoolboy insolence, all the more stirring since it was drifting towards autumn, half-ruined and careless of itself.
Wrap it in newspapers and pack it at the very bottom of the trunk, my dear. With the other curiosities.
The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy – smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit – was also the old man who’d clasped my hand while he was dying: two separate frames, superimposed upon each other, of the same soul. And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate. There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.
Goyen there. Sadly not for sale.” “Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot.” “From here, yes, you might.” He was pleased at the comparison. “Very similar painters – Vincent.
I don’t want you to help me.′ She raised her head and looked at me: her gaze hit me hard and sweet as a shot of morphine.
Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly ‘worry’ was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when – what was the point? All this useless sorrow?
I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma.
By his own choice, he had so little contact with the outside world that he frequently considered the commonplace to be bizarre: an automatic-teller machine, for instance, or some new peculiarity in the supermarket – cereal shaped like vampires, or unrefrigerated yogurt sold in pop-top cans.
People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn’t want to see.
Every time I thought of it my stomach squirmed, so that my first instinct was to slam the lid down hard and think of something else.
I hadn’t been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong.
For a moment I was disoriented, seized by panic; could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?
I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end:.
La belleza es terror. Temblamos ante todo lo que llamamos bello.
She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty – a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.