Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

Men, as everyone knows, disgusting.

Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning. All very well as far as it goes, the question of constitutionality arises, and so on. Couldn’t go to work in the morning if he didn’t think something meant something meant something else. But what is it all leading up to. An end without an ending. The

is, from the legal-philosophical, socio-political points of view, a thing of nothing.

We were allergic to each other.

life isn’t just talking? Love’s austere and lonely offices perhaps.

On certain occasions he actually has been sick, after contemplating too deeply the inexorable approach of a scheduled event.

the human mind weightless, abstract, capable of supreme rationality; the human body heavy, depressingly specific, making no sense at all. It just does things: no one knows

why. It begins for some reason to attack itself or to proliferate cells where they don’t belong. No explanation. Does the mind do that? No. Well, in the case of mental illness, he thinks, okay, sure, it can do similar things, but that’s different. Is it different?

The human mind, for all the credit he was just giving it a minute ago, is often repetitive, often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts, which in Ivan’s case are usually regretful in nature.

‘passionate’. I find some people can be very boring when they talk, but maybe it’s because, actually, they’re not passionate enough.

You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past.

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

Idea occurs, that is. Remembering something embarrassing you did years ago and abruptly you think: that’s it, I’m going to kill myself.

go on living just for Ivan’s sake, imagine. Too depressing to think. Every morning waking up, every hour spent at work, every miserable meal prepared and eaten alone. All for a younger brother he hardly speaks to.

no one has a direct profit motive for teaching children, but the whole economy will collapse if people can’t read. You get the same problem with infrastructure, and all kinds of things.

And how can feminists say they want equality, if what they really want is to be considered biologically more important than men?

How certain things can happen, resulting in such situations, even unintentionally,

the desire to win all the time, and also the naive youthful belief that it would be possible to live such a life, now soured by experience.

To force this moment into contact with her ordinary existence only seems to reveal how constricting, how misshapen her ideas of life have been before.

Maybe the whole idea of order just comes from some evolutionary advantage, whatever it is. We recognise patterns when there are no patterns. I don’t know. I’m not explaining myself very well. But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything.

suppose my idea of God is more to do with morality. What’s right and wrong.

Sometimes I just have a feeling. Like a sense of being loved by God, almost. But it’s not really something that can be explained.

Jesus is easy to love and God much harder.

In the corner of Margaret’s mind he is there, the sense of his presence, but when she tries to catch the sense it vanishes into nothing.

Depth of consolation she finds in his presence.

beauty belongs to God, and ugliness to human beings,

love, and for his love to be accepted, yes. It was in fact painful, the relief of all that compression suddenly,

But then why does that word, ‘truth’, have a certain sensation to it, which is not exhausted by the formal definition?

the brain is indeed different, that the body is merely a sack of flesh and the brain an animating consciousness.

life is

itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things.

the flagrant hypocrisy that has just been uncovered.

Who was looking out for me, Ivan? When I was the one who needed help, where were the two of you? No, you didn’t want to talk, you didn’t want to know. Neither of you. And why, because it made you feel awkward, you didn’t know what to say.

You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.

And then in other people’s lives you do the same thing, you’re the person who lets everyone down,

Thirty-two years old and running to his mother. When only minutes ago he was the one calling Ivan a child.

Because a living person has their own reality, he says. The person who’s gone has no reality anymore, except in thoughts. And once they’re gone from thoughts, they actually are completely gone. If I don’t think about him, literally, I’m ending his existence.

The only answer to death, she thought: to echo back its name in that way, with all the same intensity and senselessness, on the side of life.

To be loved, yes, for no reason, with no imaginable reward. Sudden proliferation of grace. It probably just makes everything worse. Which in a way it does, worse, more complicated.

He wants to hurt himself, yes, he wants to die, and would have, maybe, if she hadn’t been here to meet him, lecture on literary modernism, if the other hadn’t come looking for him, I won’t even tell you where my mind went.

How is it possible to know. What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking.

And to say that he loved you, and I love you. In a low voice Ivan answers: I love you too.

After a pause, Ivan replies: No, I do. Even though you annoy me a lot sometimes.

the life that is only imagined.