Everyone Brave is Forgiven

by Chris Cleave

It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.

I think the fear of going to war is less than the shame of admitting that your country can get along quite well without whatever-it-is that you’ve been up to.

The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.

Here was the remainder of ten thousand educations, the bones drifted down to this depth. It was the fossil of one’s country. She ached, because the war had cut the thin cord that bound each child to its ancestors with links made from cross-stitch and calligraphy.

The school was absolutely silent. How violent it was, this peace where children’s voices should be.

“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?”

There was no reason to fret about it: why should one expect to feel the same every day, in a world that was rearranging itself by the hour?

Everyone had anguish of their own by now—what was every bomb that fell, if not endings under unbelievable compression?

In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.

One felt nothing at all from the dead. They died, and then they were gone, and one’s heart ached from the sudden absence of feeling more than from any surfeit.

Perhaps this was what it was to grow up: this realization that the world was already staffed with people and that one was not particularly needed.

Tens of thousands were dead now, and everyone left was sickened. This was something about war that they did not warn one of: that death was an illness of the living, a cumulative poison.

There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely.

We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.”

“You might sentence him to a year in his own company, Mother. I shan’t sentence him to fifty with a hypocrite.”

Perhaps the real work of lovers was to hold themselves apart from theaters and train stations, from jam jars and picture frames, from all the bellicose everyday things that sought to beat one with time.

If you will forgive the one piece of advice a writer is qualified to give: never be afraid of showing someone you love a working draft of yourself.