Je zit er nog middenin. Je zult er altijd middenin blijven zitten. Nee, niet letterlijk. Maar in je hart. Niets houdt ooit op, niet als het zo diep is gaan zitten. Je zult altijd met een open wond blijven rondlopen. Dat is na verloop van tijd nog de enige keus. Met een open wond rondlopen of dood. Denk je ook niet?
In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.
I think I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.
Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.
And so, by the end, you have tried soft love and tough love, feelings and reason, truth and lies, promises and threats, hope and stoicism.
Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.
Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.
No, I was an odder old fool, grafting pathetic hopes of affection onto the least likely recipient in the world.
I was deeply misled by Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which seemed to insist that running naked through damp undergrowth with wild flowers entwined in your pubic hair was just about the closest thing to heaven.
Never forget, the most vulnerable spot is down the middle.
He had entered some state of grace – but one that did not exclude. He made you feel you were his co-thinker, even if you said nothing.
A question from the floor: are there tribes whose lexicon lacks the words ‘I love you’? Or have they all died out.
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen.
If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption. –.
But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort of another. And it was fine to plan an emotional strategy, but another thing when the ground opened up in front of you, and your defending troops toppled into a ravine which hadn’t been marked on the map until a few seconds previously.
Of course, there were other sorts of literature – theoretical, self-referential, lachrymosely autobiographical – but they were just dry wanks. Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.
There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.
We could not be further from ballooning’s established tropes: freedom, spiritual exaltation, human progress. Redon’s eternally open eye is deeply unsettling. The eye in the sky; God’s security camera. And that lumpish human head invites us to conclude that the colonisation of space doesn’t purify the colonisers; all that has happened is that we have brought our sinfulness to a new location.
Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon.
Time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.