Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines. Like a kind of death, what happened. A kind of death you survive out of politeness, respect for others, out of selfless love. Christ also survived his own death. And was dignified and exalted.

Oh, you take conversation too seriously, she says. Life isn’t just talking, you know.

Her hand gentle tender on his arm not moving, still, still. All quiet and stillness gathered at the point of her merciful touch.

Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction – which even makes sense from the evolutionary perspective – is simply the strongest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.

You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past. But sometimes I think, actually, I didn’t have that much power over my life anyway. I mean, I couldn’t give myself a new personality out of nothing. And things just kind of happened to me.

You know, everyone in their twenties has these problems you’re talking about – feeling left out, and thinking people don’t like you. Those aren’t serious problems at your age, even if they feel that way.

LMFAOOOO

And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?

And if you don’t hear from me, it won’t be because I haven’t thought about you. I will think about you. I just have to figure out what’s best.

oh god😭😭

It means nothing. That isn’t true: it means something, but the meaning is unfamiliar.

It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it. Money overall a very exploitative substance, creating it seems fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes.

Thought rises calmly to the surface of his mind: I wish I was dead. Same as everyone sometimes surely. Idea occurs, that is. Remembering something embarrassing you did years ago and abruptly you think: that’s it, I’m going to kill myself. Except in his case, the embarrassing thing is his life. Doesn’t mean he wants to really. Or even if he does, not as if he would do it. Just to think, or not even think, but to overhear the words inside his own head. Strange relief like a catch released: I wish. Deepest and most final of desires. Something bitter in it too, luxuriously bitter, yes. And why not. Why doesn’t he, that is, if the idea is so consoling. Oh, for other people, of course:

Not too late, he thinks, is it. To try after all. Life they could live together. Not the one they wanted, but the one they have.

Wanting forgiveness. Take back everything. Live the right life.

After weeks of sleeplessness he wakes now only to hear her turning on the coffee machine in the morning, low pummelling sound through the wall. Peace so intense and complete he could weep. Just to inhabit lightly the space that is cleared for him by her tactful silence.

The same desperation they feel, the same terrible gratitude, tender painful vulnerability, depth of pleasure.

In a deliberately quiet almost hissing voice Ivan says: I actually hate you. I’ve hated you my entire life. Without stirring, without looking around to see whether the other diners or the staff are watching them, Peter just answers: I know.

It does put a question mark over the whole thing, the way people can get sick, and God does nothing to help them. It’s hard to understand. But I don’t think it means there’s nothing there.

Some kind of order in the universe, at least. I do feel that sometimes. Listening to certain music, or looking at art.

sally rooney gets me so bad

Like, I don’t know, to find beauty in life, maybe it’s related to right and wrong.

She lets out a trembling kind of laugh. Well, if there is a God, she says, I’m sure he loves you very much. He lowers his eyes. Yeah, I can feel that sometimes, he says. Like when I’m with you, I can. If you don’t mind me saying that.

welcome back connell waldron saying i’m not a religious person but i think god made you for me

You’ve had enough sadness in your life already, Margaret, he said. You don’t need me making you sad as well. And I don’t want to, believe me. Confusedly, she answers: I just want you to be happy.

Like the feeling Ivan had for his father has nowhere to go anymore, like it’s lodged inside him, unexpressed.

Didn’t human sexuality at its base always involve a pathetic sort of throbbing insecurity, awful to contemplate?

I don’t want you to be grateful, he says. I just want you to be happy. At first she gives no answer. Rests still against him, the weight of her, fragrance of her dark hair. Then she says: Wow, I think that might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.

and when he looked at her, she seemed to feel herself understood completely, as if everything that had ever happened to her, everything that she had ever done, was accepted quietly into his understanding.

Her life, after the interlude of their nearness, will resume as before, no worse, and perhaps even for his affection a little better.

The closeness of that, as if visible behind a thin veil, through which even a hand could pass, touching, but not. The river never the same. And he is not the same man.

Can I plead with you now? he asks.

Marry me. I love you. What time you home.

OUCH

Can the deep childhood impulse to trust one’s mother, to agree with her against oneself, ever be wrestled down by the comparatively thin force of reasoned argument? Are there even reasoned arguments to be made in matters of love, marriage, intimate life?

You have come to care too passionately, too fully and completely, for an unsuitable person. You can no longer visualise your own future: not only five years from now, but five months, even five weeks. Everything is in disarray. All this for one person, for the relation that exists between you. Your fidelity to the idea of that relation. In the light of that, you have come to hold too loosely many other important things: the respect of your family, the admiration of your colleagues and acquaintances, even the understanding of your closest friends. Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting.

You actually start thinking, Christ, at least I get to die at the end. Or even wishing it would happen. I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to say it, but I do wish that sometimes, just that it would be over.

peter crashouts are so funny to me

See the girl hitting the button that says Visibly Over 25 without even looking. Thank you, yes. I too was twenty-five once, and even younger, though I readily concede that for you at this moment it must be hard to imagine. Life, which is now the most painful ordeal conceivable, was happy then, the same life. A cruel kind of joke, you’ll agree. Anyway, you’re young, make the most of it. Enjoy every second. And on your twenty-fifth birthday, if you want my advice, jump off a fucking bridge. Thanks.

going to post this quote on my 25th just wait

Deluding himself that he’s normal, isn’t that what she said the other night. So sick in the head you don’t even see what you’re doing to yourself. You’re making all three of us miserable. You little worm, I’ll fucking kill you. No, I wouldn’t, I wasn’t going to. I wish I was dead. Yeah, he says aloud. I’ll stay, I think I will stay. If that’s alright, I will.

To hear his name in her voice, he closes his eyes. The name has become so precious to him, his own name, from the way it sounds in her mouth.

You can do whatever you want with me. And he has, that is exactly what he has done, whatever he wanted. As if attempting to reach the end of his desires, to find out what is there at the end. Discovering instead with horror that his desires even when instantly and gorgeously gratified only make him increasingly unhappy and insane. Wanting too much. To love, to be loved.

As if it was him, his own fault, taking up too much space. I’m sorry. Everybody I love has to suffer. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t know how, I don’t know how to live.

You know if anything happened to you, that would be horrific for me, she goes on. I don’t really want that responsibility, he remarks. He’s looking out the window still but he can see her shaking her head. Yeah, well, tough, she says. How are you thirty-two and you’re like, I don’t want the responsibility. You think you can vanish into thin air and it won’t affect me?

Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone

all he has wanted, all his life. To walk towards her, to reach her, to accept from her extended hand the warm paper cup of coffee.

They look at one another again, tired, and tender, affectionate again. Pitying themselves and one another. The old fond familiarity in her look, without which he thinks he could not live. Yes. When he saw her waiting for him at the gate: to encounter not only her, the beauty of her nearness renewed, but also himself, the self that is loved by her, and therefore worthy of his own respect.

To care so much. Grief does that. Tell Naomi what he said, I’ll be nicer. Make her laugh. And Sylvia, we love her, we need her, I feel. All of them loved and complicatedly needed, for better or worse. Inextricable. The tangled web.

It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.

i think about this very often since i read it.