The Divers' Game

by Jesse Ball

Have you ever met someone and felt they were some reflection of you? Have you felt reflected?

How much we like to be distinguished from those who are not our equals.

That which the young share is doubly lost to us: lost because it cannot be explained or shown, and lost because we once had it and can no longer feel it. And do you know—they do not believe you were ever a child? Maybe they know you were, but they do not believe it.

It had been an idea of the morning—morning ideas were always flawed. They never take into account the accretion of weariness and grief that the late day brings.

How odd it is to think of human beings as separate—it seems so obvious, mustn’t they all be one continuous crying out? A vacuum of space, and to fill it, the slightest shout of life?

The mild pressure of life, and the world falls apart.

We are maintained by a violence so complete, it is like air. And because of that, I would rather die than anything, rather die than be alive. I’m sorry.

There can be no argument in favor of continuing a life devoid of caring, most especially not when it precludes the possibility of other delighted lives that might have been.

IT ALWAYS SEEMED TO ME THAT THERE WOULD BE SOME warning—that I would have, at the least, a month to live before I would die. Thinking that, I felt that death could likely never reach me because my everyday life would need to be stopped by this warning—at that moment I would change, be someone else (the person so warned). In a way, then, my everyday self would never die because she would not be the one living the final month. In clinging to the everyday life, therefore, I felt I could avoid death because everyday life, to my mind, is a place to which death never comes.

Everyday life is the province of death. It is where all dying takes place—for the extraordinary lands we imagine simply do not exist. There is only the ordinary. It is what we inhabit, and when death comes to find us it is there that he looks.