The revolutionary lone inventor was a fantasy of popular culture – and the Minister.
And if he had, he would not have been alarmed. A childless man of a certain age at the end of his fifth marriage could afford a touch of nihilism.
Rationalism is a blind faith.
Instead, dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque.
God was once supposed to be a grown-up, but in disputes He childishly took sides.
He no longer cared much what others thought of him. There were few benefits in growing older, and this was one.
His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.
I’m raising my glass to that love. May it never be denied, forgotten, distorted, or rejected as illusion. To our love. It happened. It was true.
Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.
His tears were for joy, for a sudden warmth of understanding that did not yet have these terms of definition: how loving and good people were, how kind the world was that had ambulances in it that came quickly out of nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain. Always there, an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come and help, embedded within a greater network of kindness he had yet to discover.
At last he could admit to himself that he had never met anyone he loved as much, that he had never found anyone, man or woman, who matched her seriousness.
By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?
A partir de cierta edad, un trayecto por la ciudad se vuelve ingratamente meditabundo. Las direcciones de los muertos se amontonan.
The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
Books are difficult to tidy. Hard to chuck out. They resist.
Poles whom I instinctively admired urged me to support the very Western politicians I most distrusted, and a language of anti-communism – which until then I had associated with cranky ideologues of the right – came easily to everyone here where Communism was a network of privileges and corruption and licensed violence, a mental disease, an array of laughable, improbable lies and, most tangibly, the instrument of occupation by a foreign power.
I met evil and discovered God. I call it my discovery, but of course, it’s nothing new, and it’s not mine. Everyone has to make it for himself. People use different languages to describe it. I suppose all the great world religions began with individuals making inspired contact with a spiritual reality and then trying to keep that knowledge alive. Most of it gets lost in rules and practices and addiction to power.
No child is an island. She thought her responsibilities ended at the court room walls. But how could they? He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.
The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down.
The truth is, we love each other, we’ve never stopped, we’re obsessed. And we failed to do a thing with it. We couldn’t make a life. We couldn’t give up the love, but we wouldn’t bend to its power.