As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.
What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.
Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.
But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.
The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?
I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you?
There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.
What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn’t really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing – no narrative dramas – to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.
You could spend your whole life’, she said, ’trying to trace events back to your own mistakes.
Loneliness, she said, is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there.
But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.
For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ’the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days.
Money is a country all its own.
Yet I still, he said, believe in love. Love restores almost everything, and where it can’t restore, it takes away the pain.
I probably didn’t share his feelings – he hoped, really, that I didn’t – but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.
What she couldn’t stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.
And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.
Music,′ she said, in a languorous and dreamlike manner. ‘Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.
The one thing you can say about people for sure, is that they’ll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.
Writing comes out of tension, tension between what’s inside and what’s outside.