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(‘Good manners,’ his mother counselled, were ‘the armour that one must don anew every morning.’)
‘The purpose of Art,’ his mother, Sylvie, said – instructed even – ‘is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.’
Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.
She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.
Sacrifice”,’ Sylvie said, ‘is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.’)
He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.
The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.
Death was the end. Sometimes it took a whole lifetime to understand that.
That was what war had become. It was no longer warrior killing warrior, it was people killing other people. Any people.
They had been brought up without shadows and seemed determined to create their own.
He lived his life in the face of death. It was a simple enough reduction without hedging it around with figurative language.
‘We’re all primitives underneath, that’s why we had to invent God, to be the voice of our conscience, or we would be killing each other left, right and centre.’
Afterwards – because it turned out that there was to be an afterwards for Teddy – he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.
The tragedy of life was death.
As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.
Life was finite. Civilizations rose and fell and in the end everything was dust and sand. Nothing beside remained.
Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.
