Nutshell

by Ian McEwan

Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams. SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

The title of the novel, ‘Nutshell’, is both a reference to a characteristic line from Hamlet, as well as this semantic field of confinement.

I count myself an innocent, unburdened by allegiances and obligations, a free spirit, despite my meagre living room. No one to contradict or reprimand me, no name or previous address, no religion, no debts, no enemies.

in heavy rains the drains, like dependable banks, return their deposit with interest;

An expert in international relations, a reasonable woman with a rich deep voice, advised me that the world was not well. She considered two common states of mind: self-pity and aggression.

Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the urinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care.

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

"It absolves the thinking classes of solutions." Seems a truism!

In my confinement I’ve become a connoisseur of collective dreams.

My mother has preferred my father’s brother, cheated her husband, ruined her son.

No close observer could decode the sibling shorthand, the time-bound sadness of this exchange.

Hobbes was right, my young friend. The state must have a monopoly of violence, a common power to keep us all in awe.”

By the time she tired of my father and his poetry, I was too well lodged to be unhoused.

Words, as I’m beginning to appreciate, can make things true.

Still, his scheme is more baker than butcher. Half-baked.

Convicted murderers in the States, nursing mothers, were allowed to raise their infants in their cells. This was presented as an enlightened development. But I remember thinking, These babies have done nothing wrong. Set them free! Ah well. Only in America.

Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces. Their narrow subjects may confound or disappoint some.

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. So

Small talk or a trade in threat and insult—I lack the social experience to know.

He paid tribute to honest memory and he forgot me. In a rush towards his own rebirth, he discarded mine. Fathers and sons. I heard it once and won’t forget.

That John Cairncross might have killed himself for love of her, if she hadn’t killed him first—there’s both pathos and guilt in this recursive notion.

Speaking’s just a form of thinking and he must be as stupid as he appears.

It’s not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most—the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds—and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don’t even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out.

reference to Dante's hell.

want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I’m owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That’s the ride for me—the Wall of Life. I want my go. I want to become. Put another way, there’s a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start’s been made. I want to read to the end of My History of the Twenty-First Century. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31, 2099. It might end before that date and so it’s a thriller of sorts, violent, sensational, highly commercial. A compendium of dreams, with elements of horror. But it’s bound to be a love story too, and a heroic tale of brilliant invention. For a taste, look at the prequel, the hundred years before. A grim read, at least until halfway, but compelling. A few redeeming chapters on, say, Einstein and Stravinsky. In the new book, one of many unresolved plot lines is this: will its nine billion heroes scrape through without a nuclear exchange?

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It’s a reversion to constant, visceral fear.

This explains Enlightenment Thinking: our self and ideas are "sculpted by pleasure, conflict, experience, ideas, and my own judgement, as rocks and trees are shaped by rain, wind, and timel

Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.

I’ll feel, therefore I’ll be.

to be or not to be--Hamlet AND Descartes?

The womb, or this womb, isn’t such a bad place, a little like the grave, “fine and private” in one of my father’s favourite poems. I’ll make a version of a womb for my student days, set aside the Enlightenments of Rosbifs, Jocks and Frogs. Away with the real, with dull facts and hated pretence of objectivity. Feeling is queen. Unless she identifies as king.

He is speaking of putting aside facts and ration thinking and just believe the truth as he finds/make it? Rosbifs, Jocks, and Frogs.--jauntily referring to French enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau .??

Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that’s old thinking. She affirms, she identifies as innocent.

Enemies of the Enlightenment will say he’s the embodiment of its spirit. Nonsense! But I know what they mean.

I’ve been hearing about the latest slaughters in pursuit of dreams of the life beyond. Mayhem in this world, bliss in the next.

She’s the rule of law and I count myself already in the court of Hobbes. The state must have its monopoly of violence.

Hobbes he English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588.04.05 - 1679.12-04) argued (in essence) that humans are bad, and that therefore assertion of authority is necessary in order to prevent civil chaos.