If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water.
Clo was looking like the cat who got the cream, the kippers, the peanut butter, the sliced chicken and a lifetime’s supply of genetically engineered slow-moving mice.
Stars in the sky like uncounted chances.
What seems so solid and certain is really part of the ceaseless pull-it-down-build-it-again pattern of history, where the turbulence of the past is recast as landmark, as icon, as tradition, as what we defend, what we uphold – until it’s time to call in the wrecking ball.
I ate, I drank, I wondered why love is so hard and life is so short. I went to sleep.
Should be great. But when have things ever worked out great? In the human dream?
Free will depends on being stronger than the moment that traps you.
There is a city surrounded by water with watery alleys that do for streets and roads and silted up back ways that only the rats can cross. Miss your way, which is easy to do, and you may find yourself staring at a hundred eyes guarding a filthy palace of sacks and bones. Find your way, which is easy to do, and you may meet an old woman in a doorway. She will tell your fortune, depending on your face. This is the city of mazes.
The English are serial racists – one group gets accepted, another group becomes the scapegoat.
For myself, with no one to love, a hedgehog spirit seemed best and I hid my heart in the leaves.
In theory you are right... Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch.
Can I have some fish-bait?’ I asked.
He goes to the window, watches the buses up and down Oxford Road, carrying their cargo of people who aren’t thinking about the future beyond teatime or tomorrow or their next holiday or whatever fear is the fear that waits for them in the dark. It’s raining. That’s what most people are thinking about. The size of our lives hems us in but protects us too. Our little lives, small enough to make it through the gap under the door as it closes.
Your life flashes before you, flash, flash, because there’s so little of it. I mean, what have you ever done that was worth doing?
The fight against fascism had been won, but it was the fight against communism that really motivated Britain and America. The world’s great capitalist democracies were not interested in any ideology except the rights of markets.
We have returned to Italy because we cannot live in England. Small-minded, smug, self-righteous, unjust, a country that hates the stranger, whether that stranger be a foreigner or an atheist, or a poet, or a thinker, or a radical, or a woman. For women are strange to men.
In any case, could it be worse than human? I read today that humans have wiped out sixty per cent of animal wildlife since 1970. In Brazil we have a dictator posting as a democratically elected president who is opening up the Amazon to commercial interests. Human beings really don’t have a better chance than AI. We are too late for anything else.
I looked back at you. These moments that are talismans and treasure.
Yeah, there’s plenty of people like me who don’t live in their brains, because there’s not much going on up there. If I was just my brain I’d be really miserable.
Our only hope has always been that the hate-filled old white guys die off and young people are more progressive.