Nutshell

by Ian McEwan

I listen, make mental notes, and I’m troubled. I’m hearing pillow talk of deadly intent and I’m terrified by what awaits me, by what might draw me in.

I am, or I was, despite what the geneticists are now saying, a blank slate. But a slippery, porous slate no schoolroom or cottage roof could find use for, a slate that writes upon itself as it grows by the day and becomes less blank.

Was it me? Too self-loving. Was it now? Overly dramatic.

Hamlet that’s so you though

So, getting closer, my idea was To be.

My mother is involved in a plot, and therefore I am too, even if my role might be to foil it. Or if I, reluctant fool, come to term too late, then to avenge it.

This is Claude as in property developer who composes nothing, invents nothing.

as if both suspect that wombs have ears.

What they intend sickens and frightens them, and they can never speak of it directly.

That he is a poet without recognition and yet he persists.

He has less money than Trudy and far less than Claude. He knows by heart a thousand poems.

My father and I are joined in hopeless love.

the detritus of ashtrays, paper plates with loathsome wounds of ketchup, teetering teabags like tiny sacks of grain that mice or elves might hoard.

His existence denies my rightful claims to a happy life in the care of both parents.

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

Ew?

Courtesy, if not clinical judgement, demands it.

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.

We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.

We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon.

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

In short, I am uncertain of her love.

My father by nature is defenceless, as I am by circumstance.

We’re alone then, all of us, even me, each treading a deserted highway, toting in a bundle on a shouldered stick the schemes, the flow charts, for unconscious advancement.

Why would the world configure itself so harshly?

It’s not her love that’s failing. It’s mine. It’s my resentment that falls between us. I refuse to say I hate her.

What I could do if instead I was at my peak. Let’s say twenty-eight years from now.

Oh hun unfortunately not much

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

“There’s blood all through the bedroom. I thought…” He doesn’t tell us that he hoped for my demise.

Beloved father, rescue me from this Vale of Despond. Take me down with you. Let me be poisoned at your side rather than placed somewhere.

If hypocrisy’s the only price, I’ll buy the bourgeois life and consider it cheap.

Monstrous injustice, to have such pain before my life’s begun.

God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

Don’t let your incestuous uncle and mother poison your father. Don’t waste your precious days idle and inverted. Get born and act!

I try to see her as she is, as she must be, the gravidly ripe twenty-eight-year-old, youngly slumped (I insist on the adverb) across the table,

Still love her? If not, then you never did. But I did, I did. I do.

Her silence is his reward. She’s thinking. As am I. Same old question. Just how stupid is Claude really?

Babies Behind Bars was a too-long radio documentary I listened to one afternoon. 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.

British people should judge America a little less methinks

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.

She took my hands and kissed them and for the first time in my life I wasn’t ashamed of them.

May it never be denied, forgotten, distorted or rejected as illusion. To our love. It happened. It was true.”

We loved each other, now I detest her as much as she detests me. Trudy, my sweet, I can hardly stand the sight of you.

Lmao??

He paid tribute to honest memory and he forgot me. In a rush towards his own rebirth, he discarded mine.

“I want him dead. And it has to be tomorrow.”

Girl just get divorced

I’m washed far downstream of drunkenness, my senses blur their words but I hear in them the form of my ruin.

If I could be upright for one minute I’d feel less sick. How I miss my spacious days of ocean-tumbling.

I still love her, I’d like her to know, but if she falls backwards, I die.

My father’s rejection of me, his possible fate, my responsibility for it, then my own fate, my inability to warn or act.

She’s making a mistake. But the lovers are locked in, as only lovers can be.

Unearthly love has made him worldly.

The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it. And I love and admire you both. What I’m saying is, I’m fearful of rejection.