Levels of Life

by Julian Barnes

Ballooning represented freedom – yet a freedom subservient to the powers of wind and weather.

To mess with flight was to mess with God.

The aeronaut could visit God’s space – without the use of magic – and colonise

it.

And in doing so, he discovered a peace that didn’t pass understanding. Height was moral, height was spiritual. Height,...

But aeronautics purged the sin of height, otherwise known as the sin of getting above yourself.

No one ever accused him of being sensible.

Once, the peasant had looked up at the heavens, where God lived, fearing thunder, hail, and God’s anger, hoping for sun, a rainbow, and God’s approval. Now, the modern peasant looked up at the heavens and saw instead the less daunting arrival of Colonel Fred Burnaby, cigar in one pocket and half-sovereign in the other,

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly.

Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.

So why do we constantly aspire to love? Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

‘You do not need to know. It is not exotic, Essex.’

The small time he had spent with her aroused the desire for greater time, for all time.

To go everywhere with her. Someone had remarked to him upon her Slav beauty. And so he imagined travelling east with her, comparing her features with those around them until she blended entirely into the physiognomical scenery, and there was nothing left but a sea of Slavs and Captain Fred.

From their shared bohemianism, a new pattern would emerge. Love would change her, as it was changing him. How, he did not exactly know.

But – I am not made for happiness.’

‘Oh, but I can say. And I do. I am made for sensation, for pleasure, for the moment. I am constantly in search of new sensations, new emotions. That is how I shall be until my life is worn away.

Three years later, having illicitly joined Lord Wolseley’s expedition to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, Burnaby was killed at the Battle of Abu Klea by a spear-thrust to the neck from one of the Mahdi’s soldiers.

You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Love gives us a similar feeling of faith and invincibility.

Because every love story is a potential grief story.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still – at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) – it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we

cross.

How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?

We are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern.

‘One death may explain itself, but it throws no lig...

So grief in turn becomes unimaginable: not just its length and depth, but...

its deceptions and false dawns, it...

One grief throws no light upon another.

We grieve in character.

‘The thing is – nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.’

Grief is a human, not a medical, condition, and while there are pills to

help us forget it – and everything else – there are no pills to cure it.

The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically (‘it hurts exactly ...

Christopher Reid,

Money could not have saved her, so what good was money, and what was the point in saving its neck?

Such approaches try to handle grief by minimising it – and doing the same with death.

As for doing what I liked: for me, this usually meant doing things with her. Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.

I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely.

This is my good luck, and also my bad luck. Early on, the words came into my head: I miss her in every action, and in every inaction.

‘On the scale of loss, it is nothing.’

also missed her morally.

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure. Whereas grief, love’s opposite, does not seem to occupy a moral space. The defensive, curled position it forces us into if we are to survive makes us more selfish. It is not a place of upper air; there are no views. You can no longer hear yourself living.

Now I read obituaries and check how long the subject was married. I envy those who had more time than I did.

Three and a half decades of relishing the pain?

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names? It also reconfigures space.

In this new-found-land there is no hierarchy, except that of feeling, of pain.

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd,