The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

He just stared into the flames. 2 A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock

He had the sense that the gods was just another name for time,

He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But

He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But

But what reality was ever made by realists?

it. Like the greatest crimes, it will be as if it never happened.

front, twenty miles south on their map and twenty-six miles west on his.

a small war in the midst of a far bigger one that no one after ever remembered.

the stone walls groggily half-standing,

So you bet two heads again. Every throw is always the first throw. Isn’t that a lovely idea?

Nor me you, said Vivien Leigh, disguised as the blind, bloated, ulcerated Jack Rainbow.

It was in her unfaithful arms that he found fidelity to some strange truth of the passing nature of everything.

And you were truthful. No. You weren’t truthful? I was accurate.

it baffled him how people now touched each other excessively and talked about their problems as though naming life in some way described its mystery or denied its chaos. He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly evaluated

attendant idea of celebrity—who were otherwise people, Dorrigo felt, you would not wish to know—ended

the King of Cornwall was both grander and more rundown than its photograph suggested,

The overhead fans rhythmically brushed the low drum of drinkers’ conversation.

Like an occasional clarinet solo would come a periodic mention of Amy.

the wonder of Basho’s great haibun, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which, Colonel Kota said, summed up in one book the genius of the Japanese spirit.

In this way, thought Nakamura, the Japanese spirit is now itself the railway, and the railway the Japanese spirit, our narrow road to the deep north, helping to take the beauty and wisdom of Basho to the larger world.

Dying air dozed in the King of Cornwall’s corridors.

But he seemed unsure, lost, as defeated as France.

Because courage, survival, love—all these things didn’t live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them;

He regarded the war as an immense personal campaign directed by Germany and Japan against him, with the sole aim of killing him, and so far, by staying alive, he was winning.

his eyes, which reminded everyone of overflowing ashtrays,

Overflowing ashtrays? Everyone?

eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time,

Many years later he found it hard to admit that during the war, though a POW for three and a half years, he had in some fundamental way been free.

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world …

But one day she was telling me how every room has a note.

These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded … right. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that’s what we mean by love, Mr Evans? The note that comes back to you?

He thought of the Greeks’ idea of punishment, which was to constantly fail at what you most desire.

Their three children—Jessica, Mary and Stewart—he loved more deeply the further away he voyaged from them. His attitude was one of benign neglect; he had not expected that they would act out his relationship with Ella among themselves.

He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life.

he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.

So few moments to weigh lives known and unknown,

But there is only light at the beginning of things.

Something lighter—a hat or a dress or a cloud. But who remembers a cloud?

Hard? he replied. Not really. We only had to suffer. We were lucky.

His words and memories were nothing. Everything was in him.