Then this is how you do it,’ and kissed her slowly, letting time fade away. And he couldn’t remember any other kiss that felt quite the same.
History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.
Every end is the beginning of something else.
That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.
It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.
Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.
You don’t think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation.
The oceans never stop... the wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island... Existence here is on the scale of giants. Time is in the millions of years; rocks which from a distance look like dice cast against the shore are boulders hundreds of feet wide, licked round by millennia...
Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.
Stick to now. Put right the things you can put right today, and let the ones from back then go. Leave the rest to the angels, or the devil or whoever’s in charge of it.
There was nothing he was going through that the stars had not seen before, somewhere, some time on this earth. Given enough time, their memory would close over his life like healing a wound. All would be forgotten, all suffering erased.
Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.
But he wishes the people really knew who they were mourning: the Isabel he had met on the jetty, so full of life and daring and mischief. His Izzy. His other half of the sky.
The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth or the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That’s how life goes on; protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame.
Victorious and dead is a poor sort of victory.
He was a practical man: give him a sensitive technical instrument, and he could maintain it; something broken, and he could mend it, meditatively, efficiently. But confronted by his grieving wife, he felt useless.
That night, Tom took a bottle of whisky, and went to watch the stars from near the cliff. The breeze played on his face as he traced the constellations, and tasted the burn of the liquid. He turned his attention to the rotation of the beam, and gave a bitter laugh at the thought that the dip of the light meant that the island itself was always left in darkness. A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it.
I’m all right on my own. And I’m all right with a bit of company. It’s the switching from one to the other that gets me.
From when she was a baby, Tom has taught the girl to respect, but not fear, the forces of nature- the lightning that might strike the light tower on Janus, the oceans that batter the island.
To make sense of it – that’s the challenge. To bear witness to the death, without being broken by the weight of it.