The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

In his old age Dorrigo Evans never knew if he had read this or had himself made it up.

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.

These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.

He looked at his foreword, written, as ever, in his customary green ink, with the simple, if guilty, hope that in the abyss that lay between his dream and his failure there might be something worth reading in which the truth could be felt.

it on the darkwood bedside table next to his pillow, aligning it carefully with his head. He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book.

He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

It wasn’t really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted though, but the aura he felt around such books—an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone. And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.

And you fell in love? Just fell. Everything was snow. In my head. Have you ever had that feeling? You have a world and then all your thoughts have turned into snow. Keith was so kind and I was snow.

Then he came to see that his primary interest was not in helping others but in saving his own life, and that his father had been right about character but wrong about his son.

He could hear sleet beginning to brush the tin roof. It was enough to be warm with her. Perhaps that’s all there was.

Perhaps that was what hell was, Dorrigo concluded, an eternal repetition of the same failure.

Winter ice melts into clean water— clear is my heart.