Adultery And Other Diversions

by Tim Parks

He lived in the frenzy of the choice unmade,

a country where a friend of mine told me that at his wedding his grandmother advised him to try to be faithful for at least the first year.

Europe

The basis of his novel, "Europa".

‘You’re a myth for me’,

Dead Poets Society,

It was that very special time in history when quaint rustboxes from those countries that never learned to build cars the way we did were monopolizing the slow lanes of every Western European highway.

even as we travelled that morning the Italian lira had plummeted.

Plato did not believe in the realm of pure forms he spoke so much about.

‘equilibrio interiore’.

if he spoke instead of an ideal, more real realm beyond, that was merely his way of expressing his outrage, expressing a mental space, a place of yearning that is in all of us: for things to be still, for everything to be settled, defined and resolved: our jobs, our loves, our lives.

we frequently used all kinds of expressions suggesting paths of action that, on examination, turned out to be unavailable to us.

perhaps eager to impress a girl decidedly more interesting for her physique than her anxieties.

announced a lawyer who had come along to assist us.

Strasbourg is as much German as French,

a typical border town where two cultures gaze at each other from close up and try not to be overly contaminated.

liberté, égalité, fraternité

between ideals and technique, between the initial vision of a state where to be just would also mean to be happy, and then the hopelessly complex, indeed impossible mechanisms needed to bring this about.

‘no one must know what is happening, if we are to avoid dissension

the students sang and danced.

Or so a French colleague was informing me, a woman in her mid-forties, lately divorced.

"She" from "Europa".

drafting a possible constitution for a United Europe.

one of the guidelines of the competition was that the constitution must enhance a sense of pooled sovereignty and common European identity.

appeared to be falling in love.

of course he didn’t believe in Europe. He couldn’t give a tinker’s curse,

Vikram Griffiths.

like nations who sell weapons but don’t like to hear them go off,

So many of our values have to do not only with not affirming our own power, I thought, but with denying the affirmation of power in general.

Even the idea of being European has more to do with a rejection of nationalism than with any positive statement of identity.

‘We Germans will feel safer from ourselves in a...

some referred to it as the most sophisticated brothel in the world.

national pride now has to do with being able to demonstrate how far one has surrendered national interests.

There were those who claimed that the Parliament only moved back and forth every month so that the men could get away from their regular mistresses for the week.

in Plato’s Republic Socrates suggested that those who distinguished themselves in public life should be rewarded by being able to sleep with more women.

Novelists can hardly be expected to construct narratives that honour political ideals, I thought.

What had I been noticing about our trip, after all, indeed about the European Parliament in general, if not the self-serving nature of the one, the seamy absurdities of the other.

What I never feel is European.

I do wonder if it mightn’t be better if one could feel European, the way as a child one wished one could believe in God.

chapel

‘Meditation Room’,

something that feels the need to be there, to focus the room, but is doing its best not to remind you of an altar, or a lectern, or a pulpit.

We know that our Community was built as a last resort, from the ashes of what was more than just another war, from too much knowledge.

Its rhetoric is almost wilfully hollow. And this is its strength.

It expands not by aggression but by surrender, the surrender on the part of each new member of that delirium of individual destiny which characterized our national pasts.

We can thus feel fairly sure that, even if we must accept that it will never stir our souls, all the same we are hardly likely to be asked to die beneath its flag.

desultorily.

Imagine if one could use the particle iva during the marriage service – ‘till death us do part, so to speak’.

appetence

xenolith

How much of thought is words?

Appetence

Aphony,