We’re bound by the same rules that dog out pets. The great chain of non-being is round our necks too.
And he saw the studio he was about to abandon for his bed as it might have appeared in a documentary film about himself that would reveal to a curious world how a masterpiece was born.
My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth.
It wasn’t hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters.
It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said.
They had never discussed feelings, and had no language for them now.
Old Europa tosses in her dreams. She wants to help but she doesn’t want to share or lose what she has.
Without faith, how open and beautiful and terrifying the world must have seemed.
But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel.
The other day, Thomas reminded me of the famous Latin tag from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum – there are tears in the nature of things.
Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?
She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real.
I will return. I will find you. Love you. Marry you. And live without shame.
She found his testicles first and, not at all afraid now, she curled her fingers softly around this extraordinary bristling item she had seen in different forms on dogs and horses, but had never quite believed could fit comfortably on adult humans.
If she went, what was he going to do with all these loving facts, these torturing details? If she wasn’t with him, how would he bear all this knowledge of her alone? The force of these considerations drove the words out of them, they came as easily as breath. “I love you,” he said.
Now human blubber draped his efforts.
Heller’s Catch-18, Fitzgerald’s The High-Bouncing Lover, Orwell’s The Last Man in Europe, Tolstoy’s All’s Well That Ends Well.
Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent – how the tilt of a skull could change a life! – Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony’s manuscript from.
She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer that most women thought.