Kindle Notes & Highlights
You could say there are … three groups. The first, the overwhelming majority, are a docile mass who like the comfort of the herd. The second category is made up of cynics, mainly from the intelligentsia: they chorus the slogans, but when they chant it’s all a game, it’s a joke. They wave their flags in ironic frenzy. They brandish the leaders’ portraits on their poles as if they were heads held aloft on pikes. The third and last category is that of the rebels, naïve enough to hope they can disrupt this grotesque parade.
The fatal mistake we make is looking for a paradise that endures. Seeking pleasures that do not grow stale, lasting attachments, embraces with the vigour of lianas: the tree dies but their enveloping tracery continues verdant. This obsession with what lasts causes us to overlook many a fleeting paradise, the only kind we can aspire to in the course of our lightning journey through this vale of tears. These often make their dazzling appearance in places so humble and ephemeral that we refuse to linger there. We prefer to fashion our dreams from the granite blocks of whole decades. We believe we
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I went away, vaguely thanking her, the way a neighbour certain of seeing her again the next day might have done. Many years later that old woman, whom I left all alone on the little front steps of her doomed house, would inspire feelings of remorse, such as recur throughout our lives and for which we never receive absolution. *
This disagreeable feeling that we were imitating all the others was added to by our dependence on pleasure, like that induced by drugs. We had to increase the dosage, step up the frequency of our bouts of lovemaking. And our bodies would give way, exhausted, like those of the moths intoxicated with light. And every night we would be pained by this growing realisation of a trite and bitter truth: pleasure only aims at itself, being a marvellous end in itself. A repetitive loop, heady, exhausting, delicious, perfumed with the scent of tanned and salty skin, moulded by muscles made firm in
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The old men in the Kremlin are sabotaging our love lives. They won’t let us travel freely, or read what young people in the West read, or listen to the music they listen to. (“Or drink double whiskies in a bar on Sunset Boulevard,” some wits would add, “before driving off in our convertibles.”)
That night there is an unaccustomed gentleness in the way we make love, as if we had found one another again after a very long separation, having suffered greatly and grown old.
