Levels of Life

by Julian Barnes

He used to make rude noises at policemen and disapproved of prison (where he had once been confined for debt): he thought juries should ask not “Is he guilty?” but rather “Is he dangerous?”

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.

she was “a figure so admirably suited for conspicuity.”

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.

“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. My heart desires more excitement than anyone—any one person—can give.”

He had loved her as much as he was able for three months, and she had done the same; it was just that her love had a timing switch built into it. Nor would it have helped to ask about her previous lovers, and how long they had lasted. Because their very failure, their impermanence, would only have seemed to promise his success: that is what every lover believes.

THE LOSS OF DEPTH 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.

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.

Some friends are as scared of grief as they are of death; they avoid you as if they fear infection. Some, without knowing it, half expect you to do their mourning for them. Others put on a bright practicality. “So,” a voice on the phone asks, a week after I have buried my wife, “what are you up to? Are you going on walking holidays?” I shout at the phone for a moment or two, then put it down. No: walking holidays were what we did together, when my life was on the level.

I do not believe I shall ever see her again. Never see, hear, touch, embrace, listen to, laugh with; never again wait for her footstep, smile at the sound of an opening door, fit her body into mine, mine into hers. Nor

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any pattern exists. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.

This is true, and defines the lost-ness of the griefstruck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one “knows.” You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself), yet you continue. And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less.

“It 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.”