I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.
The truth often appears in the guise of a threat to the social code. It has this in common with rudeness. When people tell the truth, they can experience a feeling of release from pretence that is perhaps similar to the release of rudeness. It might follow that people can mistake truth for rudeness, and rudeness for truth. It may only be by examining the aftermath of each that it becomes possible to prove which was which.
It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process of decline began.
Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honour, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.
She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it.
It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.
I realised,’ she said, ’that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.
The sad fact... is that in this era of science and unbelief we have lost the sense of our own significance. We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value.
It’s strange,′ he said, ’that you always changed everything and I changed nothing and yet we’ve both ended up in the same place.
A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.
There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.
The day lies ahead empty of landmarks, like a prairie, like an untraversable plain.
And he was more Irish in America than he’d ever been at home.
I knew then, she said, that he was a liar, that for all his reportage and his honesty he was determined to keep himself untouched, to take without giving, to hoard himself like a greedy child.
He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.
This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person’s solitude – a kind of ghost – nearly drove her mad for awhile.
I had been thinking lately about evil, I went on, and was beginning to realize that it was not a product of will but of it’s opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire. It was, in a way, a state of passion.
It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.
It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist’s vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.
You have to forget about the boys,′ he said. ‘For a while at least... They’ll devour you... They can’t help it. It’s in their nature. They’ll take it all until there’s nothing left.