Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

One partner dies first and the other spends their final years alone and crushed. You love your kids and watch them grow to something wonderful and then you have to leave them and not meet with them again. And all so short, seventy years or so, with him near fifty now. That’s twenty years, assuming that you’re lucky, less than half of what had already slipped by, and Mick felt certain that these final decades would flash past with grim rapidity.

It had put things in perspective. He supposed that was what laughs were for.

He knew that fifty years from now, after his death, she’d hardly venture out of doors again, shunning a firmament into which, by that time, her painted paper dragon would have long since blown away and left her only with a memory of the wind that tugged with such insistence on his string, an elemental force that would at last have won its battle and pulled Snowy Vernall from her empty, reaching fingers. That,

Besides, the truth was a far subtler tool. Just tell people the truth and then let them mislead themselves, that was his motto.

She’s convinced that no one really needs free will as long as there is a sustainable illusion of the same to stop everyone going mad.

Life is on an endless loop, her consciousness revisiting the same occasions for eternity and always having the experience for the first time. Human existence is a grand recurrence. Nothing dies or disappears and each discarded condom, every dented bottle-top in every alleyway is as immortal as Shamballah or Olympus. She feels the unending marvel of a beautiful and dirty world swell to include her in its fanfare music. Lowering her caked lashes, she imagines everything around her wriggling and alive, suddenly made out of a billion glossy organisms that she has not previously noticed, the whole landscape covered in a spectral gauze, a fresh-spun silk of circumstance.

madder than a bottle full of windows.

and ideas meant for the children of some forty years ago: is that the best that the twenty-first century has got to offer?

When all this extraordinary stuff is happening everywhere, are Stan Lee’s post-war fantasies of white neurotic middle-class American empowerment really the most adequate response?

Aw, love. You shouldn’t slap yourself about. We’ve all done bad things, or we think we have. It’s only when you can’t face up to ’em and put ’em in perspective that you end up stuck to them, so that that’s who you are and where you are forever.

And a conscience is the most vindictive, vicious little fucker that I’ve ever met, and I don’t think that anybody gets off easy. We all judge ourselves. We all sit here on these cold steps, and that’s enough. The rest is billiards. We all feel the impacts and we blame the ball that’s hit us. We all love it when we’re cannoning and on a roll and think it must mean that we’re special, but it’s all balls. Balls and billiards. [A pause.] You’re looking down my top again.