Waarom zou vader op zo’n nare plek willen werken met al die buren? Het slaat nergens op.
The suggestion, however, regarding my age – that I am perhaps not quite fifty years old – would flatter me immensely. For it is many years now since I have been able to say in all honesty that I have only seen half a century. This is simply the age, or at least the visual representation of an age, at which I have been stuck for a large proportion of my 256 years of life. I am an old man.
But then I didn’t know what I was giving up until it was already gone. No one ever does, do they?
I would have dearly liked to close the French doors between us for a bit of peace, but Mam wouldn’t allow it; she said that solitude would give me ideas and the last thing a boy of my age needed was ideas.
The gods would never allow such a perverse outcome, would they? I am divine. My place is on the mountaintop with Jupiter, Mars and Apollo.
You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who’s gone terribly and then it’s not grief at all, it’s more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you.
I hope he didn’t suffer too much.” “He did,” she said. “But he was very stoical about it. It’s those of us who are left behind who’ll have to suffer now.
Don’t we all hope for some form of immortality? We might not be able to breathe forever but there are other ways to stay alive.
This is a Bible, you blasphemous cretin,” he said, his face now growing even redder than before. “This is the word of the Lord.” “If you say so,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “He only had one book in him, though, didn’t he? Couldn’t write another?
Maude’s way of dealing with Charles was to treat him like an ottoman, of no use to anyone but worth having around.
I stared at him and felt the tears forming in my eyes. “Do you know how much I’ve missed you?” I asked him. “It’s been almost thirty years. I shouldn’t have had to spend all that time on my own.
A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face. He looked a hundred years old. He looked like a man who had died several months earlier. He looked like a soul in pure torment.
E’ la storia che ci ha condotto fin qui. Se non fosse per la storia, nessuno di noi oggi sarebbe seduto a questa tavola. Saremmo tranquillamente seduti nella nostra casa di Berlino. Stiamo correggendo la storia, qui.
He lifted his pint and took a long gulp and I watched his face grimace a little as he tried to swallow. His eyes closed briefly as he fought the urge to spit it back up. ‘Christ, that tastes good,’ he said with all the credibility of a Parisian complimenting a meal in Central London. ‘I needed that.
I sat down again, wishing I had never been brought here. It was as if I had walked onstage into the middle of a dramatic play, where the other characters are already engaged in a battle that has been going on for some years but which only now, upon my arrival, is allowed to reach a climax.
Why are you so afraid of people being happy?” he read. “Why can’t you just live and let live?
But they have corrupted history, they know nothing of our struggles. They see Russia in such simplistic terms. The privileged as monsters, the poor as heroes, everyone is the same.
I suppose you wish you’d won the war.” I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, Mr. Darcy-Witt,” I said, as if I were explaining something obvious to a child. “No one wins a war.
She opened her mouth to say something, but when she did she realized that she couldn’t find any words to express her surprise, and so she did the only sensible thing she could think of and closed it again.
And they would surely find some way of suggesting that you were as guilty as any of us. No matter how young you were.