Waterland

by Graham Swift

For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?

(because she and I had one of those youthful things going, which, though youthful, are not always innocent and which, though they happen in your youth, can affect the rest of your life),

Superstition’s easy; to know what’s real – that’s hard.

Why this seeking for omens? This superstition? Why must the zenith never be fixed? Because to fix the zenith is to contemplate decline. Because if you construct a stage then the show must go on. Because there must always be – don’t deny it – a future.

Because life goes on and July afternoons turn to old gold,

And where history does not undermine and set traps for itself in such an openly perverse way, it creates this insidious longing to revert. It begets this bastard but pampered child, Nostalgia. How we yearn – how you may one day yearn – to return to that time before history claimed us, before things went wrong. How we yearn even for the gold of a July evening on which, though things had already gone wrong, things had not gone as wrong as they were going to. How we pine for Paradise. For mother’s milk. To draw back the curtain of events that has fallen between us and the Golden Age.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.’

Is he learning that if he’d never set out to learn he’d never have learnt that it’s all beyond him?

(And I did, very carefully. And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …)

(You see, even then, the historian’s besetting sin: he ponders contingencies, he’s no good at action.)