She never said anything unless she had something important to express, which made you realise how much of what people generally said – and he included himself in this statement – was unimportant.
And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was more real?
You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.
I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.
So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don’t hold on to them the sea will take them too.
I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.
I didn’t appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?
All the same, it seemed to him now that that life had been lived almost unconsciously, that he had been lost in it, absorbed in it, as you can be absorbed in a book, believing in its events and living entirely through and with its characters. Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; never again had he been able to believe in that way. Perhaps it was that – the loss of belief – that constituted his yearning for the old life.
It was possible, I had realised, to resist evil but in doing so you acted alone. You stood or fell as an individual. You risked everything in the attempt: it might even be the case, I said, that evil could only be overturned by the absolute sacrifice of self. The problem was that nothing could give greater pleasure to your enemies.
Fate, he said, is only truth in its natural state. When you leave things to fate it can take a long time, he said, but its processes are accurate and inexorable.
Whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us.
The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight.
When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.
A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure.
She would begin to view them... with greater objectivity; their need for her started to look like something less discriminating, more parasitical. She felt duped by them into believing herself to be generous, tireless, inspiring, when in fact she was just a self-sacrificing victim. It was this feeling that often brought her to a position of clarity about her own life. She would start to give them less and herself more: by draining her, they created in her a new capacity for selfishness.
This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.
The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.
Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.
If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.
At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind.