Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

(Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It’s never reasonless and its reason’s not usually nice.)

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it’s a lottery.

Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

(Often I think boys don’t become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man’s mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there.)

Listening’s reading if you close your eyes. Music’s a wood you walk through.

People’re a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can’t hold, needs for things you can. Adverts know this. Shops know this. Specially in arcades, shops’re deafening. I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! But walking down Regent’s Arcade, I noticed a new need that’s normally so close up you never know it’s there. You and your mum need to like each other. Not love, but like.

The world won’t leave things be. It’s always injecting endings into beginnings. Leaves tweezer themselves from these weeping willows. Leaves fall into the lake and dissolve into slime. Where’s the sense in that? Mum and Dad fell in love, had Julia, had me. They fall out of love, Julia moves off to Edinburgh, Mum to Cheltenham and Dad to Oxford with Cynthia. The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

The world’s a headmaster who works on your faults. I don’t mean in a mystical or a Jesus way. More how you’ll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that’s wrong with us, if we’re too selfish or too Yes, Sir, No, Sir Three Bags Full, Sir or too anything, that’s a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault for ever, or one day, you do notice it, and fix it.