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Everyone is a parent. That’s what getting old is: catastrophic senescence. That’s what dying is. You become a parent. You fall into the stream.’
Everyone should be acknowledged. Everyone should be missed when they are not right there with you because of what they carry, this very distinct way they have of bearing themselves that is like no one else and that is built by everything they have done and everything they have seen. When that goes – even just a little way, through the doorway, the other side of the wall, even while you can still hear the movement taking place – it should be missed. It should be startling, when we travel, when we are there and then not there. Travelling is a reminder that every thought it is possible to
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Maybe she’d fallen for us, to show us how alone she was, how difficult it had been since Dad died and she came home only to herself each night. The difference, when you get in at the end of the week, close the door behind you, put the keys on the worktop and take your shoes off and realise that the week’s completion entails only itself, that there is nothing after it, only yourself and the beginning of the next week and the one after, that all weeks forever are pressed into a seamless block, there is nothing outside of it, no relief in something shared, no brief escape or refuge – you realise
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Our immersion in the past, our existence, wherever we might technically be, in times and places remote from the present. So many times I had identified errors – in my work and in my relationships – stemming from the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there. I noticed this more as I got older. Age was, among so many other things, the realisation that you couldn’t correct this, that the pursuit wasn’t meaningful, there was no perfect clean reality on the other side. You’re flawed, and the world you see
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