It was always the view of my parents,” Emily said, “that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
But of course, it had all been her – by her and about her, and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky.
Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal.
The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.
The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It’s the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.
Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?
She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity?
She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start – she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.
It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.
Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on.
Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was?
It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in – but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.
It’s hilarious to recognize how completely another person resembles your imperfect self.
This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind. That was all London was beyond its center, an agglomeration of dull little towns. She made a resolution never to live in any of them.
Unlike in Daisy’s novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don’t remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.
It’s beautiful here and we’re still unhappy.
The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.
In difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can’t, move on to the second best thing.
I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee.
Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality.