← Vie’s Library
The problems at home were so huge and omnivorous that the idea of escaping them, of being somewhere else, had come to seem impossible.
she couldn’t credit that these weeks were the ones that would decide all weeks to come. She found it impossible to believe that now, the present, so flimsy and flyaway, whipsawing, switchbacking, should be the image the rest of her life was cast in, when she could barely see herself in it at all.
Life at that time was like walking on a path made of spinning tops You took a step you were spun off one way The next step spun you off another Every moment was the moment when everything changed
Not even like flowers more like some magician’s illusion made out of tissue or coloured ice
suppose that’s
what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common.
for the most part he was happy, happier than he had ever been. Perhaps that was what made it hard to accept. He had always assumed happiness was for other people, for the plodders, the norms, the sleepwalkers, as the reward for their blinkered conformism.
Yet sleepwalking was possible now as it had never seemed before. The world was made with this kind of life in mind, he came to realize. The world was a machine designed to sustain and perpetuate this kind of life – adult life, normal life. It wasn’t like college, when every moment bristled with pathways, alternatives, strangers and confusion. Everything was linear, everything made sense, the future appeared before him like a railway track, moment by moment, day by day, carrying
him onwards without his needing to do a thing.
He did not sleepwalk through these moments. Every pleasure civilization had to offer suddenly seemed a paltry thing, compared to this – sitting in a stationary
The mothers were all ten years older than her and made of materialism a kind of private language, displaying their acquisitions to each other like bees doing a waggle dance.
The new Dickie didn’t think that way. He believed in the future as something that would always work out in his favour, a series of incremental improvements he was due automatically, like phone upgrades.
whatever sureness of himself or sense of himself as a man, had suddenly blown away in the breeze, a suit of armour made of dandelion clocks.
were a tree, an infinity of rustling leaves.
Different in some way that is repugnant, that is unacceptable. We’re taught that if we don’t hide that difference away, we’re going to be alone. Unloved. And so we learn to cover ourselves up, with products, labels, masks of one kind or another. Clothes, goods, sports teams, belief systems, politics, nationalism – things
The science is not ambiguous. If we don’t face up to reality, we’re not going to make it. And to face up to reality we first need to set aside all of these inventions and disguises we’ve been so busy accumulating. We need to take off our masks.
Or to put it another way, we are all different expressions of the same vulnerability and need.
Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know.
A once-in-a-century event – that’s what you were told. Then came the drought, and that was once-in-a-century too. Maybe that’s how it will go – instead of one definitive cataclysm, a series of ‘anomalies’, each time lasting longer, with the stretches of what you call normal life becoming further and further apart, until one day it dawns on you that this is normal life now – the flooding, the empty shelves, the candlelight, the networks down, the impassable streets, the sewage in your living room, schools closed, work closed, because what use is work now?
Loneliness can make people do terrible things, he says. When you set out on this road, you never thought for an instant you would be this lonely, did you?
That’s why you do it Because you can’t go back You can only go forward So you’re making a vow you’ll go forward together Stay together even though you’ll change get sick get old
That’s why you do it Because you can’t go back You can only go forward So you’re making a vow you’ll go forward together Stay together even though you’ll change get sick get old That’s the vow
Freed from the burden of condolence, the embarrassment of its insufficiency, they had looked you in the eye as if seeing you for the first time.