These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus.
Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.
Daringly, they touched the tips of their tongues, and it was then she made the falling, sighing sound which, he realised later, marked a transformation. Until that moment, there was still something ludicrious about having a familiar face so close to one’s own. They felt watched by their bemused childhood selves.
Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out.
Surely the Greeks had a word for it, choosing to act in one’s own very worst interests? Yes, they did. It was akrasia.
My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we’re going to be at peace with each other, I’m not saying it’ll happen. There’s a good chance it won’t. I’m saying it’s our only chance.
I was pure and good. I loved it that they couldn’t understand how profound I was.
She was touched by his delicacy, by the way he stared fiercely at his sheet of paper, perhaps trying to hear in advance his poem through her ears.
This sense of absence had been growing... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity... He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.
The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.
But Cecilia, having learned modern forms of snobbery at Cambridge, considered a man with a degree in chemistry incomplete as a human being.
He doesn’t trouble himself with closing the shutter – total darkness, sense deprivation, might activate his thoughts. Better to stare at something and hope to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Already, his tiredness seems fragile or unreliable, like a pain that comes and goes. He needs to nurture it, and to avoid thoughts at all costs.
His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace – a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died.
How could he fail to love someone so strangely and warmly particular, so painfully honest and self-aware, whose every thought and emotion appeared naked to view, streaming like charged particles through her changing expressions and gestures?
The new, wellspring of all bad dreams. Driven by a self-harming compulsion, I listen closely to analysis and dissent.
Any five-year-old girl – though boys would do – gave substance to her continued.
These disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage.
It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.
Why would the world configure itself so harshly?
The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it.