Religions, moral systems, her own included, wee like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great ditance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was to judge?
When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.
I am uncertain whether our civilization at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief, whether people like Bernard and June cause the trouble, or people like me.
We’re alone then, all of us, even me, each treading a deserted highway, toting in a bundle on a shouldered stick the schemes, the flow charts, for unconscious advancement.
As he pushed her by the shoulder toward the gate, the rising howl commenced. Nightmares had beome a science. Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining toward the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally.
An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.
We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.
Unless, unless, unless – a wisp of a word, ghostly token of altered fate, bleating little iamb of hope, it drifts across my thoughts like a floater in the vitreous humour of an eye. Mere hope.
She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.
Above the rush-hour din it was her ideal self she heard, the pianist she could never become, performing faultlessly Bach’s second partita.
To take up the violin or any instrument was an act of hope, it implied a future.
The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.
In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed, love was recast as delusion.
Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions.
Florence suspected that there was something profoundly wrong with her, that she had always been different, and that at last she was about to be exposed. Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust: her whole being was in revolt against the prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.
Love wasn’t possible without a self, and nor was thinking.
Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict – what to give to others, and what to keep for yourself.
The infinite variety of the human condition precludes arbitrary definition.
It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we’re surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy.
Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem.