Twist

by Colum McCann

Those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Ta-Nehisi Coates

we have all had our difficulties with the shape of the truth,

just being honest to the times, interpreting the present in light of the past, and perhaps he got it correct in some way.

it was a time of enormous greed and foolish longing and, in the end, unfathomable isolation.

I am scared of what I too have become, steeped in regret and saudade. I often lie awake wondering what might have been if I had done things just a little differently.

Some of the novel had been autobiographical, but the fictional elements were truer. All the truth, my father told me, but none of the honesty.

I had been an athlete once, a middle-distance runner. I had taken risks. Gone distances. Now I watched those in swimming togs who actually braved the cold water, and I envied them their courage.

At a certain stage our aloneness loses its allure.

birds perched on the branches like small sentries. The light was snatched inside and served with silver tongs. All the bellhops and waitstaff were Black. It surprised me that they didn’t seethe with resentment.

I wanted to convince myself it was not my legacy: it was, after all, the British and the Dutch who had done this, not me, it was not my fault, I was Irish, and we had been colonized too, we wore the wounds,

where he said not a single moment cloned itself.

I felt sorry for them, but then again, I have learned how easy it is to condescend when you don’t participate.

this was a woman who had seen and survived the very worst of things, and that she had somehow transcended them.

I want to know why in the name of God people accept what’s happening to us. You know if the ocean was a bank, they’d have saved it a long time ago.

smile when really all I had was the remnants of a wrecked life.

The traffic above was a constant going, going, going, a death marathon.

Hers was a long and beautiful laugh, it had many elsewheres in it.

A storm was more than a rumor now. The wind coming off the water smelled like wet metal.

The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.

depression. It makes perfect sense now—part of our human warmth is the darkness we don’t show to each other.

it is often the unseen that most deeply stirs the imagination.

Gramsci’s notion of a pessimist of the intellect, an optimist of the will.

There was no quit in him. He might have dozed off in his chair, but that’s about it. There was an incredible boredom and a simultaneous promise about it all.

new cables that were planned around Africa at the cost of billions of dollars. The same corporations who controlled the cables controlled the information too.

A new cable would make billions of dollars for its owners. It was also quite possible that the information within was owned or tapped, or both. The old colonialism was dressed up in a tube. It snaked the floors of our unsilent seas.

I felt so very pasty sitting in my chair. Cowardly too. There I was, the great truth teller stuck in his seaside condo.