Autumn (Seasonal, #1)

by Ali Smith

Can you be hungry and dead? Course you can, all those hungry ghosts eating people’s hearts and minds.

Prose

Regrets when you’re dead? A past when you’re dead? Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self? He looks out from the copse at the edge

Existentialism

That’s not what I mean, she says. I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling. I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of the anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it. I’m tired of the violence there is and I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen. I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to any more.

the nuns told all the little girls there was about a little boy called Rastus. Rastus is in love with a little white girl. But the little white girl gets ill, and it looks like she’s going to die. Someone tells Rastus that she’ll be dead by the time the leaves have fallen off the tree at the front of her house. So Rastus collects up all the shoelaces he can find. Maybe he also unravels his jumper and cuts the unravelled wool into pieces. He’s going to need a lot of pieces. He climbs the tree outside the girl’s house. He ties the leaves on to the branches. But one night a really wild wind blows all the leaves off the tree. (Forty years before Christine Keeler was born, but presumably at a time when a lot of those nuns who apparently told stories like this one to the little girls in their care were growing up or were young adults, Rastus was a name popular in blackface minstrel shows. It became a character-name, a racist shorthand for someone

It’s all right to forget, you know, he said. It’s good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we’d never sleep ever again.