The Noise of Time

by Julian Barnes

And all done with words, whose transformative powers were truly revolutionary.

truth’s disguise was irony.

Was there a greater portrayal of the shattering of human illusions than King Lear? No, that was not quite right: not shattering, because that implied a single great crisis. Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away.

But in real life, under real terror, what guilty conscience? What bad dreams? That was all sentimentality, false optimism, a hope that the world would be as we wanted it to be, rather than as it was.

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

“Life is not a walk across a field”: it was also the last line of Pasternak’s poem about Hamlet. And the previous line: “I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood.”

could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves—the music of our being—which is

transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history. This was what he held

Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable.

But in the real world, especially the extreme version of it he had lived through, things were not like this. There was a third choice: integrity and corruption. You could be both Chartkov and his morally shaming alter ego. Just as you could be both Galileo and his fellow scientist.

Perhaps conscience no longer had an evolutionary function, and so had been bred out. Penetrate beneath the modern tyrant’s skin, go down layer after layer, and you will find that the texture does not change, that granite encloses yet more granite; and there is no cave of conscience to be found.

could be destroyed in one of three ways: by what others did to you; by what others made you do to yourself; and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself. Any single method was sufficient; though if all three were present, the outcome was irresistible.

Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.