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“No, it was quite interesting really. You can see all the things people have bought.”
I’d said this staring out at the rain. Then I glanced at Ruth and got a real shock. I don’t know what I’d expected; for all my fantasies of the past month, I’d never really considered what it would be like in a real situation like the one unfolding at that moment. Now I saw how upset Ruth was; how for once she was at a complete loss for words, and had turned away on the verge of tears. And suddenly my behaviour seemed to me utterly baffling. All this effort, all this planning, just to upset my dearest friend. So what if she’d fibbed a little about her pencil case? Didn’t we all dream from time to time about one guardian or other bending the rules and doing something special for us? A spontaneous hug, a secret letter, a gift? All Ruth had done was to take one of these harmless daydreams a step further; she hadn’t even mentioned Miss Geraldine by name.
I now felt awful, and I was confused. But as we stood there together staring at the fog and rain, I could think of no way now to repair the damage I’d done. I think I said something pathetic like: “It’s all right, I didn’t see anything much,” which hung stupidly in the air. Then after a few further seconds of silence, Ruth walked off into the rain.
“I didn’t know what to say. In the end, she actually asked. She said: ‘Tommy, what are you thinking?’ So I said I wasn’t sure but that she shouldn’t worry either way because I was all right now. And she said, no, I wasn’t all right. My art was rubbish, and that was partly her fault for telling me what she had. And I said to her, but what does it matter? I’m all right now, no one laughs at me about that any more. But she keeps shaking her head saying: ‘It does matter. I shouldn’t have said what I did.’ So it occurs to me she’s talking about later, you know, about after we leave here. So I say: ‘But I’ll be all right, Miss. I’m really fit, I know how to look after myself. When it’s time for donations, I’ll be able to do it really well.’ When I said this, she starts shaking her head, shaking it really hard so I’m worried she’ll get dizzy. Then she says: ‘Listen, Tommy, your art, it is important. And not just because it’s evidence. But for your own sake. You’ll get a lot from it, just for yourself.’ ”
re-reading it now, this passage feels v momentous when read through the lens of our world today. there's the looming spectre of common mortality ofc but also just the soul-crushing and time-dissolving nature of modern work
It’s funny now recalling the way it was at the beginning, because when I think of those two years at the Cottages, that scared, bewildered start doesn’t seem to go with any of the rest of it. If someone mentions the Cottages today, I think of easy-going days drifting in and out of each other’s rooms, the languid way the afternoon would fold into evening then into night. I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea. I think about how I read them, lying on my front in the grass on warm afternoons, my hair—which I was growing long then—always falling across my vision. I think about the mornings waking up in my room at the top of the Black Barn to the voices of students outside in the field, arguing about poetry or philosophy; or the long winters, the breakfasts in steamed-up kitchens, meandering discussions around the table about Kafka or Picasso. It was always stuff like that at breakfast; never who you’d had sex with the night before, or why Larry and Helen weren’t talking to each other any more.
Maybe it was to do with that room, the way the sun came in through the frosted glass so that even in early summer, it felt like autumn light. Or maybe it was because the stray sounds that would occasionally reach us as we lay there were of donors milling about, going about their business around the grounds, and not of students sitting in a grassy field, arguing about novels and poetry. Or maybe it had to do with how sometimes, even after we’d done it really well and were lying in each other’s arms, bits of what we’d just done still drifting through our heads, Tommy would say something like: “I used to be able to do it twice in a row easy. But I can’t any more.” Then that feeling would come right to the fore and I’d have to put my hand over his mouth, whenever he said things like that, just so we could go on lying there in peace. I’m sure Tommy felt it too, because we’d always hold each other very tight after times like that, as though that way we’d manage to keep the feeling away.
[...] Greece is certainly a small country; but, in virtue of its geopolitical, cultural and economic position, it is an outpost of Europe and thus also its border. To see it in this way is to understand it as a permanent point of delimitation and contact between ‘Europe’—but also, and the distinction is significant, the European Union—and its outside: the Other against which Europe defines and constructs itself.
i love this intro paragraph ending
The metaphor of Fortress Europe thus represents a highly sophisticated construction—far more so than the fortified continent of World War Two. Its lines of fortification are mobile and teem with electronic surveillance devices, reinforcing an arsenal of repression centred round the weapons of bureaucracy and fear. Its walls are semi-permeable, designed not simply to exclude but to filter entrance in a highly restrictive way, constantly fabricating and modifying systems of hierarchical categorization, of which the distinction between ‘refugees’—acceptable, but only in limited numbers—and ‘economic migrants’, illegitimate and thus illegalized, is only one example. It operates by establishing compacts with other states or agencies, outsourcing functions of coercion, detention, surveillance and control. [...]
[...] we may ask why an influx of 1 million people trying to establish themselves in a population of 510 million should supposedly trigger such a crisis.
The reality is that there was no ‘refugee crisis’, but rather one of the repressive apparatus of Fortress Europe. It is this regime that, faced with a crisis such as that of the Greater Middle East, combined with the long-term consequences of neoliberal policies, climate change and chronic instability in large areas of Africa and Asia, produces the ‘refugee crisis’ for public opinion, creating the discourse that justifies the policy supposed to resolve it. What the term ‘refugee crisis’ transcodes, Nicholas De Genova has argued, is ‘a permanent epistemic instability within the government of transnational human migration, which itself relies upon the exercise of power over the classifying, naming and partitioning of “migrants”/“refugees”.’footnote18 Greece’s role in this new phase of Fortress Europe has been twofold. On the one hand, the country acts as the gendarme—or better, the warder—of Europe’s huge south-eastern flank whose border-post it is.
this reminds me of what sam kriss (i know, i know) wrote in response to slavoj zizek in 'Building Norway':
The idea that the primary problem is the ‘flow’ of migrants into Europe, that Europe is experiencing a migration crisis, rather than the far more accurate reversal: migrants are experiencing a European crisis, one of fences and fascists and cops.
[...] The EU–Turkish accord is not a mistake, a departure from so-called ‘European values’, which have long since been swallowed up in the waters of the Mediterranean along with the tens of thousands of human beings who have perished there. It is wholly in keeping with the logic that has presided over European integration from the beginning, making the EU’s external border the dividing line between the fully human, white and European, and the sub-humans destined for a ‘precarious life’ and an anonymous death, to which the waters of Lampedusa and Lesbos bear everlasting witness.
Live or let die
The Mediterranean has become the most lethal of the EU’s external borders. Its waters are the site of interlacing sovereign powers—those of the littoral states, but also those now superimposed on them in the form of the EU and its agencies, and notably those specifically charged with border control, whose operations transform the modalities of state action on which they rely. These powers manifest themselves as those of life and death; the power to make live or let die, to quote Foucault’s famous definition of biopower. In other words, the objective pursued via control mechanisms of this kind is not to demonstrate some ideal impenetrability of the border, or to make crossings impossible, knowing perfectly well that they will happen anyway. It is to decide whether and by what margin this rather than that route will be taken, with this or that mortality rate depending on the choice; whether and on what condition one ‘saves’ (or permits saving); whether a rescue or a humane welcome is too encouraging, or not off-putting enough—like the in-draught of a fire—so that the management of the flow, including the implied decisions to let live or let drown, is judged acceptable.
ooof
The temporal distribution of deaths notably reveals that the number of victims rose after 2001, and more so from 2003, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, before the wrenching increase due to the wars in Syria and the wider Middle East, there was a ‘normal’ rate of more than a thousand deaths a year among those trying to reach Europe. There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty. [...]
[...] At the heart of the Greek crisis, like that of the other countries of the European periphery, is over-indebtedness, both private and public, which means powerful tendencies towards economic polarization in the EU and particularly in the Eurozone. Thus, Greece, Portugal, Ireland and, to a lesser degree, Spain all experienced over-indebtedness while Germany went on running up surpluses. In the background of the debt crisis was a European configuration that tended to deepen the divide between the centre and the periphery—or rather peripheries, plural, because the European South had been joined by a second internal periphery, that in the East, which had from the start been allocated the status of a Mezzogiorno, a supplier of cheap labour. Over-indebted, the countries of the first periphery found it impossible to borrow on the markets, as Eurozone rules required, and had to have recourse to ‘rescue plans’, loans made available by the EU, with the participation of the IMF. Memoranda of Understanding are nothing but the accords signed by these countries, first of all Greece, in return for fresh loans granted to cover the old, a way to assure private banks that these countries would honour their interest payments. The mechanism thus involved a new round of debt, with the result that at the end of the operation the level of indebtedness would be greater still—which is what has happened in the case of Greece.