The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

Once you take off your mask, it’s like all the other masks become transparent, and you can see that beneath our individual quirks and weirdnesses, we’re the same. We are the same in being different, in feeling bad about being different. Or to put it another way, we are all different expressions of the same vulnerability and need. That’s what binds us together. And once we recognize it, once we see ourselves as a community of difference, the differences themselves no longer define us. That’s when we can start to work together and things can change.

Why would they hide what they care about?

Maybe they’re afraid that if they show they care about it someone will take it away,

Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know. When the kids ask, tell them that no one meant any harm.

Your mind is like one big pile of Jenga bricks and if it gets one good prod the whole thing will come tumbling down.

the country gazes back at you like a mirror with nothing in it

Here’s something you’ve been thinking about lately: when things come back, very often they come back different, like they come back weird or wrong. The best example of course would be Pet Sematary, which you watched in the bowling alley one time with Zargham on Zargham’s brother’s phone, where this family’s cat gets run over and they bury it in this weird graveyard and then it magically comes back from the dead except now it’s evil and attacks everybody but for some reason they don’t 100 per cent get the message so then when their son dies they bury him there too and basically that goes even worse than it did with the cat. The moral of the film is that you can technically bring things back but it’s a lot of trouble and at the end of the day you will probably wish you hadn’t. Ghosts, similar situation, like it’s different because nobody actually asks ghosts to come back, they just come back, but the point is that they act so insane when they do it’s impossible to imagine that they were ever people. You could even sort of say it about oil, in fact that’s what got you thinking about it because you were doing it in Geography about how oil is formed from tiny sea creatures from 150 million years ago, like plankton that were swimming around during the Jurassic, so in a way it’s the total Pet Sematary thing of at first you pull it out of the ground and think Fantastic this solves all my problems but then after a while everyone realizes whoa, wait a sec, this miracle substance is ...

The world gathered behind you gathered above you Balanced on a pinpoint

Time doesn’t do what you think it will does it

Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment. You could even say we are paid in entertainment. The novel was the first instance of what in the twenty-first century has become a vast and proliferating entertainment industry, an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us. We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real.

It’s funny, she seems like a loser, but she acts like she doesn’t know or care she’s a loser, which makes you wonder whether she is, in fact, a loser.

afterwards it’s worse than before because now the darkness knows it is darkness the emptiness knows it’s emptiness the poor house knows there’s nobody home

it’s the same as with the squirrels. If you don’t do something, the situation will only get worse. It’s not the same, you say. He’s a human being. Sure everyone’s a human being, once you go down that road,

Darkness fills the sky like rising water. Dying leaves quiver tremulously on the bone-grey branches.

Daddy had loomed over everything like the sky and you lived in his moods the sunshine the frost the storms Now the sky is gone the weather is gone

He’s dead Let all that misery be dead with him

Here’s a fact about the universe, maybe the number one fact: it’s impossible to comprehend how much it doesn’t care about us. It’s not just that it doesn’t care about Life. It doesn’t even care about matter. Everything we think of as everything – starlight, marshmallows, frogs, basketball, electricity, every single person who ever lived and died, all the stuff there is and all the energy – that’s only a minuscule fraction of the universe. The rest of it is darkness – dark energy, dark matter, which are just words scientists use for ‘we don’t know what this is’. What we call the universe is basically a microscopic speck on this giant incomprehensible darkness, like a piece of lint on an XXXXXXXXXXL-size sweater, and life is like a nano-sized speck on that speck. So when you think about it who cares about saving it, or anything in it, because basically none of it was ever even supposed to be there.

the hissing not-quite-silence, the sound of black trees, pine-needle soil, the dark unknowable universe swirling like sharks around you.

If you do something evil, do you think that means that you were evil all along?

Now he gazes out the window, looking somehow unlike himself – older, sadder, his cheeks hollower, his mouth bunched up, like someone’s just handed him all of his adult worries for the rest of his life.

If only the shit could hit now! If only there could be a tsunami, a firestorm, some Ragnarok that would engulf the world! To suffer, to die en masse, in innocence – somehow that seems better than one person being killed, seems better for everybody.

the jostle of bodies was like a midnight forest, bone-white and grave-black,

This is the world now It will be how we make it