He’d turned to me, red-faced, and asked: ‘If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?
That there might be any practical divergence between my mother’s situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality.
When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don’t experience your self as “natural” or “inevitable” – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages. Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.
Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like, “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon!” and so we put down our glasses and sigh.
They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.
She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.
But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.
I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.
She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something.
But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.
Libraries are not failing “because they are libraries.” Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One.
I’d decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.
It hurts just as much as it is worth.
I knew my mother was in the process of becoming, or trying to become, “an intellectual,” because my father often threw this term at her as a form of insult during their arguments.
I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end – we are not our parents and they are not us – my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years... whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.
She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk.
I worked regularly and kept a journal; I saw that creation was an accretive process which couldn’t be hurried, and which involved patience and, primarily, love. I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through.
But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.
To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.