Love, Etc

by Julian Barnes

Do we not, each of us, write the novel of our life as we go along?

Perhaps as you get older you start losing the things you’ve learnt as an adult. Perhaps you end up with only what you had as a child. In which case, she’ll end up speaking nothing but French.

And one characteristic of the human race which seems to me ineradicable is its capacity to be surprised by unsurprising things. Hitler invades France – surprise! Presidents are assassinated – surprise! Marriages do not last – surprise! The snow falls in winter – surprise!

Shall we begin with four of them?

death of parents

You can’t put life down the way you can put a book down.

expected some last, extra condition. There usually is one when people are about to get what they want. It’s as if they can’t accept the simplicity of the fact, they’ve got to complicate it, impose their will in some unimportant way. Yes, I’ll buy your car but only if you throw in the furry dice dangling from the rear-view mirror.

But then, I reflected, perhaps this is the nature of time: the less there is of it left, the less you care about its calibration.

More and more, I want less and less.

I want the kind of guy who turns out, when you get to know him better, to be exactly like how you took him to be when you first met him.

I want the kind of guy who calls when he says he’ll call, and comes home when he says he’ll come home. I want the kind of guy who’s happy being the kind of guy he is. I want the kind of guy who wants the kind of woman I am.

You organise a marriage, you protect your children, you manage love, you run your life. And sometimes you stop and wonder if that’s true at all. Do you run your life, or does your life run you?

Oliver used to have a theory he called Love, etc: in other words, the world divides into people for whom love is everything and the rest of life is a mere ‘etc’, and people who don’t value love enough and find the most exciting part of life is the ‘etc’.

Would you rather destroy yourself by lack of self-knowledge, or destroy yourself by its acquisition?

When someone claims to be in love with two people at the same time, in my opinion that means they’re only half in love with each of them.

Another question. Would you rather? Love or be loved? You can only choose one or the other! Tick, tock, tick, tock, BONG! Decision time!