Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where – and who – you were. If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience “the sixties” until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties – or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.
Logic: yes, where is logic? Where is it, for instance, in the next moment of my story?
First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years.
When I felt myself escaping from the earth,” he commented, “my reaction was not pleasure but happiness.” It was “a moral feeling,” he added. “I could hear myself living, so to speak.
My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as “petite and unopinionated”. My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes “short and bossy.
Playing Cupid, I should have you know, isn’t just a matter of flying around Arcadia and feeling your tiny winkle throb when the lovers finally kiss. It’s to do with timetables and street maps, cinema times and menus, money and organisation. You have to be both jaunty cheerleader and lithe psychiatrist. You require the binary skill of being absent when present, and present when absent.
One small revenge might be to die and show no signs of having died.
You might even ask me to apply my ‘theory’ to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I’m not sure I could answer this, to be honest.
Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.
You realize that you want official interference into other people’s lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible.
You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn’t have to see your life as any kind of triumph – his own had hardly been that – but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful.
Isn’t growing up a necessary process of losing one’s innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.
So now, contended indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm.
You only followed where you were going if you wanted to get back to where you had started from, and she knew that was impossible.
The orthodoxy runs, that if a marriage is founded on less than perfect truth it will always come to light. I don’t believe that. Marriage moves you further away from the examination of truth, not nearer to it.
Truth to life, at the start, to be sure; yet once the process gets under way, truth to art is the greater allegiance.
This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn’t;.
And who does not want their love authenticated?
The one thing that is very good in life today is death.
Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion.