Levels of Life

by Julian Barnes

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 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.

So grief in turn becomes unimaginable: not just its length and depth, but its tone and texture, its deceptions and false dawns, its recidivism. Also, its initial shock: you have suddenly come down in the freezing German Ocean, equipped only with an absurd cork overjacket that is supposed to keep you alive.

If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.”

Whereas grief, love’s opposite, does not seem to occupy a moral space.

Grief is the negative image of love; and if there can be accumulation of love over the years, then why not of grief?

The chief witness to what has been your life is now silenced, and retrospective doubt is inevitable. So you need them to tell you, however glancingly, however unintendingly, that what you once were—the two of you—was seen.

the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic.

Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).

time is now so less measurable than it used to be.

it can no longer be corroborated by the one who was there at the time. What we did, where we went, whom we met, how we felt. How we were together. All that. “We” are now watered down to “I.” Binocular memory has become monocular.

you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.

what is “success” in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on?

It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to. And so, perhaps, with grief.