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Liver spots and baggy skin and indigo veins.
It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty.
Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.
There’s no need to fear change, or necessarily welcome it, not when you don’t have anything to lose. Change is just what life is. It is the only constant I know.
You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don’t attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind . . .’
That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.
Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.
‘If only we could find a way to stop time,’ said her husband. ‘That’s what we need to work on. You know, for when a moment of happiness floats along. We could swing our net and catch it like a butterfly, and have that moment for ever.’
It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost. The past is not one separate place. It is many, many places, and they are always ready to rise into the present. One minute it is the 1590s, the next it is the 1920s. And it is all related. It is all the accumulation of time. It builds up and builds up and can catch you violently off guard at any moment. The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no
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It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone
you care about laugh.
Actually, I would be fine with this. This ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ moment. With a kiss forever a possibility. With her looking at me and me looking at her.
Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.
For centuries I have thought all my despair is grief. But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love. I have been approaching this realisation for some time now.
‘There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.’
As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered.
Michel de Montaigne’s
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People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation.
Something inside us. Something still not explained that doesn’t come from the sky or the clouds or some palace in Heaven but from inside here.’ He pats his chest. ‘You simply can’t fall in love and not think there is something bigger ruling us. Something, you know, not quite us. Something that lives inside us, caged in us, ready to help us or fuck us over. We are mysteries to ourselves. Even science knows that. We have no fucking idea how our own minds work.’
You sometimes have to look at what you know is there and discover the things right in front of you. The people you love.
The time ahead of you is like the land beyond the ice. You can guess what it could be like but you can never know. All you know is the moment you are in.
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”’
And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight?
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How, in short, would I live? So,
took me only 437 years, but I finally realised how to go about answering all this. I didn’t quite know what the answer was but I knew the process. In a way the process was not knowing the answer, and being fine with that. I knew the fear that had been stopping me. So, it was time to live. I had reached a start and an ending and so – there, in that Australian night, as we said farewell to Omai and headed to the airport, I did not feel the fear I should have felt. Neither for me, nor Marion, my unfathomable daughter. We were survivors and, being such, we would survive. The known has gone and the
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After all, we aren’t just who we are born. We are who we become.
Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself.
You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.
