“Today they have everything, people go into debt to buy stupid things. My wife didn’t waste a cent, the women of today throw money out the window.”

Even that way of complaining about the present and the recent past, and idealizing the distant past, didn’t annoy me as it usually does. It seemed, rather, a way, like many, to convince oneself that there is always a slender branch of one’s life to hang on to, and, by being suspended there, get used to the inevitability of falling. What would be the sense of arguing with him, telling him: I was part of a wave of new women, I tried to be different from your wife, perhaps also from your daughter, I don’t like your past. Why start arguing—better this tranquil lullaby of clichés. [...]