Nutshell

by Ian McEwan

SO HERE I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for.

NOW, TO MY father, John Cairncross, a big man, my genome’s other half, whose helical twists of fate concern me greatly.

line of diminishing, innocent toes like children in a family photo.

Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes?

Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose.

Europe, according to her, in existential crisis, fractious and weak as varieties of self-loving nationalism sip that same tasty brew.

And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran.

Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the urinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care. And soon, with demographic transition, the reverse, populations in catastrophic decline. Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, capitalism corrupt, destructive and in disgrace, no alternatives in sight.

Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions.

We’ll always be troubled by how things are – that’s how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.

But here’s life’s most limiting truth – it’s always now, always here, never then and there.

Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past.

Boredom, said this Monsieur Barthes, is not far from bliss; one regards boredom from the shores of pleasure.

will its nine billion heroes scrape through without a nuclear exchange?

He’s over-ordering, a natural impulse after a murder.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said.