I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better.
That while it was right to look up to teachers, it was always important to question their authority.
Why write a novel if it was going to offer more or less the same experience someone could get by turning on a television?
When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old, kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.
By then, of course, we all knew something I hadn’t known back then, which was that none of us could have babies.
So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.
It’s hard to put the whole world to rights, but let us at least think about how we can prepare our own small corner of it, this corner of ‘literature’, where we read, write, publish, recommend, denounce and give awards to books. If we are to play an important role in this uncertain future, if we are to get the best from the writers of today and tomorrow, I believe we must become more diverse. I mean this in two particular senses.
Firstly, we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures.
One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence.
In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers.
In those early months, we’d somehow developed this idea that how well you were settling in at the Cottages – how well you were coping – was somehow reflected by how many books you’d read. It sounds odd, but there you are, it was just something that developed between us, the ones who’d arrived from Hailsham.
Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.
I’m proud of you. A good son. I hope I’ve been a good father to you. I suppose I haven’t.’ ‘I’m afraid we’re extremely busy now, but we can talk again in the morning.
Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness.
We drove past a large creature with numerous limbs and eyes, then even as I watched, a crack appeared down its center. As it divided itself, I realized it had been, all along, two separate people – a runner and a dog walk woman – moving in opposite directions who for an instant happened to be passing one another. Then came a store with a sign saying ‘Eat In Take Out’ and in front of it, a lost baseball cap on the sidewalk.
Do you believe in the human heart? Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and unique? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?
How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back.
This is why I find it so hard to be civil around people like Capaldi. When they do what they do, say what they say, it feels like they’re taking from me what I hold most precious in this life.
The English are fond of their idea that our race has an instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for that was all they reported, that she was Japanese and that she had hung herself in her room.
I’m surprised someone would desire so much a path that would leave her in loneliness. Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.