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He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"
They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."
He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"
They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."
The billionaire had been keen to give me the outline of his life story, which had begun unprepossessingly and ended – obviously – with him being the relaxed, well-heeled man who sat across the table from me today. I wondered whether in fact what he wanted now was to be a writer, with the literary magazine as his entrée. A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it. This man had bought himself in, and out, of a great many things. He mentioned a scheme he was working on, to eradicate lawyers from people’s personal lives. He was also developing a blueprint for a floating wind farm big enough to accommodate the entire community of people needed to service and run it: the gigantic platform could be located far out to sea, thus removing the unsightly turbines from the stretch of coast where he was hoping to pilot the proposal and where, incidentally, he owned a house. On Sundays he played drums in a rock band, just for fun. He was expecting his eleventh child, which wasn’t as bad as it sounded when you considered that he and his wife had once adopted quadruplets from Guatemala. I was finding it difficult to assimilate everything I was being told. The waitresses kept bringing more things, oysters, relishes, special wines. He was easily distracted, like a child with too many Christmas presents. But when he put me in the taxi he said, enjoy yourself in Athens, though I didn’t remember telling him that was where I was going.
this is so funny
[...] It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: 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. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting; we could no longer be found at the usual number, the usual address. My younger son, I told him, has the very annoying habit of immediately leaving the place where you have agreed to meet him, if you aren’t there when he arrives. Instead he goes in search of you, and becomes frustrated and lost. I couldn’t find you! he cries afterwards, invariably aggrieved. But the only hope of finding anything is to stay exactly where you are, at the agreed place. It’s just a question of how long you can hold out.
[...] His wife’s father summoned him to a meeting at which he was asked to relinquish any claim on their shared assets, and he agreed. He believed he could afford to be generous, that he would make it all back again. He was thirty-six years old and still felt the force of exponential growth in his veins, of life straining to burst the vessel in which it had been contained. He could have it all again, with the difference that this time he would want what he had.
‘Though I have discovered,’ he said, touching his fleshy upper lip, ‘that that is harder than it sounds.’
[...] She herself was English, and so exquisitely beautiful it was hard not to credit her with some inner refinement; but though her nature did contain some surprises, they were not of a particularly pleasant kind. He often invited her parents to stay, as though by studying them he might decipher the mystery of their daughter. They would come to the island, where the ancestral home still remained, and would stay for weeks at a time. Never had he met people of such extraordinary blandness, such featurelessness: however much he exhausted himself with trying to stimulate them, they were as unresponsive as a pair of armchairs. In the end he became very fond of them, as one can become fond of armchairs; particularly the father, whose boundless reticence was so extreme that gradually my neighbour came to understand that he must suffer from some form of psychic injury. It moved him to see someone so injured by life. In his younger days he almost certainly wouldn’t even have noticed the man, let alone pondered the causes of his silence; and in this way, in recognising his father-in-law’s suffering, he began to recognise his own. It sounds trivial, yet it could almost be said that through this recognition he felt his whole life turning on its axis: the history of his selfwill appeared to him, by a simple revolution in perspective, as a moral journey. He had turned around, like a climber turns around and looks back down the mountain, reviewing the path he has travelled, no longer immersed in the ascent.
amazing
My neighbour laughed, and said that I was probably right. My parents fought all their lives, he said, and no one ever won. But no one ran away either. It is the children who have run away. My brother has been married five times, he said, and on Christmas Day he sits alone in his apartment in Zurich, counting his money and eating a cheese sandwich. [...]
wow
[...] When you’re in that place you make time for it, don’t you, Ryan said, the way people make time to have affairs. I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you? No matter how busy you are, no matter how many kids and commitments you have, if there’s passion you find the time. A couple of years ago they gave me six months’ sabbatical, six whole months just for writing, and you know what? I put on ten pounds and spent most of the time wheeling the baby around the park. I didn’t produce a single page. That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up. In the end I was desperate to get back to the job, just for a break from all the domestic business. But I learned a lesson there, that’s for sure.
[...] 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. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said. [...]
I replied that I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist. My mother once admitted, I said, that she used to be desperate for us to leave the house for school, but that once we’d gone she had no idea what to do with herself and wished that we would come back. And she still, even now that her children were adults, would conclude our visits quite forcefully and usher us all off to our own homes, as though something terrible would have happened if we had stayed. Yet I was quite sure that she experienced that same sense of loss after we’d gone, and wondered what she was looking for and why she had driven us away in order to look for it. [...]
sorta disagree personally but it's an interesting thought