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I know now, what I didn’t then, that affection can’t always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways; and that one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else.
Who isn’t lonely, I’d like to know? And that includes people who do have someone but just haven’t noticed.
“Circus”, in Emerence’s vocabulary meant national disasters — in this case the Second World War — all those situations where women become neurotic, grasping and stupid, and men go berserk and start knifing people, as happens in the wings of history’s theatre.
In my student days, I detested Schopenhauer. Only later did I come to acknowledge the force of his idea that every relationship involving personal feeling laid one open to attack, and the more people I allowed to become close to me, the greater the number of ways in which I was vulnerable.
From the very first day of the new year, it was as if an invisible hand were turning the mysterious tap from which good and bad flowed into people’s lives, sometimes off, and sometimes on. Just then, the tap was in full flow. It wasn’t spectacular, but it was distinctly perceptible.
For some reason this analogy really hit home for me
The moment the words were out I realised what nonsense I was talking: doesn’t want, doesn’t wish, won’t, might object. How could she? Everyone knew that from now on things would only ever happen to Emerence. Nothing would depend on Emerence, except death.
We were dealing in such different currencies. Emerence’s dictionary featured filth, scene, scandal, laughing stock of the street and shame. His contained law, order, solutions, solidarity, effective measures. Both phrasebooks were accurate, it was just that they were in different languages.
Humankind has come a long way since its beginnings and people of the future won’t be able to imagine the barbaric early days in which we fought with one another, in groups or individually, over little more than a cup of cocoa. But not even then will it be possible to soften the fate of a woman for whom no-one has made a place in their life.
