The Forgiven

by Lawrence Osborne

They made him remember that he was almost old, in that phase of pre-oldness that was curiously more alive that the preceding stages, but alive because it was ending.

‘Open your door to a good day and prepare yourself for a bad one.’

They were just efficient pessimists, and therefore astute readers of human nature.

‘The past is gone, what is hoped for is absent and there is only the hour in which you are.’

Or do we produce our own accidents? Are they the sum total of our little neglects?

For whereas an accident is no one’s fault, a lie is an individual man’s specific fault because it is deliberate. It’s a real act, something willed, and it is more difficult to forgive than anything.

since life is but a sport and a pastime, as the Koran carefully reminds us, and because it is a game and nothing more, one forgets that the point of life is death.

Why did so few people have the gift of travel, of subtle displacement and simple curiosity? Which was, in the end, merely a question of imagination. Try imagining where you are, and not lumbering around with your festering discomforts and dissatisfactions.