The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.
But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.
Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history – even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
When you are in your twenties, if even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.
In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.
At times, I suspect that the concept of maturity is maintained by a conspiracy of niceness.
And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.
And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. We did not make the clouds come in the first place, and have no power to disperse them. All that has happened is that from somewhere – or nowhere – an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again.
We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.
And that’s a life, isn’t it? Some achievements and some disappointments.
At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.
Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions?
It seemed... that intelligence wasn’t as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person’s company and yet wicked in another’s. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence... In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confident and therefore less intelligent.
Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.
An English silence – one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties – prevailed. I got into my bed and wept. The matter was never referred to again.
One feeling at least grows stronger in me with each year that passes – a longing to see the cranes. At this time of year I stand on a hill and watch the sky. Today they did not come. There were only wild geese. Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist.
The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.
It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet.
Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that’s why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn’t be in charge.