The Sudden Appearance of Hope

by Claire North

I’ve always liked knowledge. It makes me feel like I’m real, part of something after all.

Too many voices all at once on the internet, screaming, just all the time screaming, sometimes it’s hard to be heard. Sometimes I think that the world is full of screaming.”

vanity makes people vulnerable.

“You know why the experts don’t have an easy answer? Because a fucking expert’s the guy who knows how complicated the fucking questions are.”

and of course, everyone was right, in their own way.

“Faced with mounting stress, the body enters an alarmed state. Capillaries dilate, heart beats faster, breathing increases, skin flushes, muscles tense. With each social rejection, pathways are reinforced in the brain which links social rejection with physiological anxiety. Thus reinforced, you are more likely to experience a physical reaction to even slight social discomfort, thus making you more uncomfortable, thus reinforcing the physical and so on and so on. All thought is feedback: sometimes that feedback can be too loud. That’s what I think, anyway.”

“Rafe is a genius, but none of this was the point of my research.” “What was the point?” I asked, soft, in case we broke the spell. “To make people better. Of course. To make the world a better place.” She rolled the ginger between her chopsticks, put it back down. “I think my brother has taken something beautiful and made it obscene,” she said at last.

“‘Qui tacet consentire videtur’,” she mused, with a half-empty smile. “‘He who is silent is seen to consent.’”

Happy: to be pleased, delighted or glad. Favoured by fortune. The experience of pleasure, or joy. Happiness: a lie, constructed to ensure that we never find it.

“‘Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running in them.’” “‘Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not a truth.’”

I let her cry a while, held her close, felt her snot and tears on my shoulder, wanted to cry myself, why is that, when I hear a child cry on the train it makes me sad, see a stranger weep and feel tears come to my eyes, a weakness, perhaps, a place where emotion hasn’t become accustomed to the extremities of feeling.

“It must have been hard,” I said at last, “to see your idea turned into a monstrosity.” “Yes,” she replied, still not turning her head to face me directly, “it is.”

And she liked animals, and animals liked her, and when she was grown-up, she’d keep two cats and a dog, but not a zebra, because zebras were horrid things even though they were stripy.

In the East, never leave your chopsticks in a bowl of rice when you finish eating; to do so is an offering for the dead.

The internet gave us all the power of speech, and what did we discover? That victory goes to he who shouts the loudest, and that reason does not sell.

Perfection is an idol built upon oppression. Perfection is the heaven that kept the masses suppressed; the promise of a future life that quells rebellion. Perfection is the self-hatred an overweight woman feels when she sees a slim model on TV; perfection is the resentment the well-paid man experiences when he beholds a miserable millionaire. Perfection kills. Perfection destroys the soul.”

does knowledge drown out the place where fantasy should be, imagination, dreams of friends and love? Does breath fill the void where I should have humanity, grown and nurtured by human experience, experience of humans? Am I nothing more than this?

Curious fact: tears of emotion have a slightly different chemical composition than basal or reflexive tears.

She had difficulty seeing me in the crowd, so I approached her. “Incredible,” she breathed. “It’s as if you are invisible, one moment to the next. You exist only in this moment, and then your face is eaten by memory.” “Shall we go?” I replied.

“You wanted a twin so you could watch me,” I sighed. “You’re afraid that when you can’t see me, I’m not real.”

Is she the she I think she is? Performance, a face in the camera, voice on the tape, what is she when there is nothing digital to recall her? What might she do? Who is she when I cannot remember her?

“It’s just money,” he replied. “It’s just paper.” “It’s time,” I said, sharper than I’d meant. “It’s the means to purchase time. It’s the cost of a new bed in a hospital, a solar panel on a roof; it’s a year’s salary for a tailor in Dhaka, it’s the price of a fishing boat, the cost of an education, it’s not money. It’s what it could have been.”

“Did you? I thought perhaps I had enjoyed yours too, I seemed very happy in the footage they showed me, and I remembered the night with warmth and assumed that an emotional memory might not have been erased even if the visual pathway was severed, and that therefore maybe you were good.”

She spun on the spot, throwing her hands into the air, an academic faced with poor processes, a woman whose life, whose every breath had taken her to the place she thought she wanted to be, only to discover on arrival that it was nothing like she’d imagined.

“And what if she’s right?” “To hide?” “To destroy Perfection. What if thought is not free? What if memory is a prison, society a lie? Sometimes I look around and all I hear is screaming, screaming, screaming – what if you are the enlightened one?”

So she went to Byron instead. She saw what Byron saw, that the only way to truly destroy Perfection wasn’t to re-write the system, but to shatter the dream.

His voice trailed away. A shadow man, who’d spend his days chasing shadows and found no illumination from the process.

“These days, we offer solutions for everything,” she agreed. “Including things that don’t really need fixing.”

“Because … because …” I sucked in breath. “Because while I agree with you in almost every possible respect, about everything – Perfection, loneliness, freedom, power, choice – practically everything – I think there has to be a place where it stops. I think there has to be a moment when you turn round and permit yourself to be defined by the world that surrounds you. I am free. I choose to honour the freedom of those who live around me. I choose to honour them. I think your freedom does not do that.”