Kindle Notes & Highlights
Perhaps this was what getting older meant, realising that you cannot fix everything.
The Temple was all that remained of one journey for her race that had come to a hasty end generations back. It had been called the Holy Family in those days, the Sagrada Familia, but no one knew to what family it might refer: probably some king or other, one of those few, far too few, who had owned the resources of the planet, sending the rest of the human flock down into a spiral of destruction.
after years of expensive academic education, we had absolutely no practical skills. Sometimes it felt as if all the sacrifices that my parents had made to provide me with a better future had been for nothing.
I remember flying once, when I was very little, how frightening it was, how miraculous it felt. But the wrong kind of miracle, like black magic.
This brave new world was about wanting fewer things, not more things. There were no more certainties.
When I was student I had read about a famous American poet who had also wanted to do more than one thing. But to her, wanting everything had not left her paralysed like it had me: she became a famous poet after all. She had also ended up with her head inside an oven, but even so she had not been gobbled up by history, as had happened to so many women who had managed to do even one of the things they wanted to do.
Air travel? Bees? A child? Not anymore. All I wanted was to see a bird, only once.
They had been a symbol of all that was lost, and it had become fashionable to have tattoos of hummingbirds for a while; people thought they could keep them forever like that.
How curious it was that nearly all the towns where I had lived had large academic libraries at their centres, heaving like a living heart. And when they didn’t, I felt a tiny bit lost.
