The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

Why at the beginning of things is there always light?

Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life.

He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was.

But what reality was ever made by realists?

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

And though he did not will it or want it, he could feel that something was passing between them, something undeniable.

He had followed knowledge, like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

As they circled, their bodies found a strange peace in resting on each other that was also the most terrible anticipation and tension.

Nothing had happened, yet everything had changed.

He was falling and falling, and it felt a wild freedom. Whatever it might be was as unknowable and perplexing as she was. He understood that much. He did not know where it would end.

And yet the more the innermost part of her screamed to move, the more she recognised that she was frozen to one place, one life.

Her body was a poem beyond memorising.

love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds.

love does not end until all its power is exorcised in misery and cruelty and obliteration as much as in goodness and joy.