Levels of Life

by Julian Barnes

when a couple who had been jointly photographed returned to examine their proofs, the wife always looked first at the portrait of her husband—and so did the husband.

Love gives us a similar feeling of faith and invincibility.

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.

“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.”

“There’s someone missing.”

Griefs do not explain one another, but they may overlap. And so there is a complicity among the griefstruck.

What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn’t, wouldn’t, save her?

Nor do you know how you appear to others. How you feel and how you look may or may not be the same. So how do you feel? As if you have dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body. That is what it feels like, and why should it look any different? No wonder some want to swerve away to a safer topic of conversation. And perhaps they are not avoiding death, and her; they are avoiding you.

what happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

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.

There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Ask anyone who deals with victims of torture. Ask rape counsellors and those who handle domestic violence. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next,

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

was her principal rememberer. If she was anywhere, she was within me, internalised.

Why should anything happen when everything has happened?

And so it feels as if she is slipping away from me a second time: first I lose her in the present, then I lose her in the past. Memory—the mind’s photographic archive—is failing.

… I am not fully a Dame, as she does not know about it.”

And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.

This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

if I have survived what is now four years of her absence, it is because I have had four years of her presence.

“I resent the fact that she’s become part of the past.”

We go down in dreams, and we go down in memory. And yes, it is true, the memory of earlier times does return, but in the meanwhile we have been made fearful, and I am not sure it is the same memory that returns. How could it be, because it can no longer be corroborated by the one who was there at the time.

There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love.

hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think.” The second part of that sentence was what I stubbed my foot against: it struck me as unnecessarily masochistic. Now I know that it contains truth. And if the pain is not exactly relished, it no longer seems futile. Pain shows that you have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavour of memory; pain is a proof of love. “If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.”

But among any success there is much failure, much recidivism.