In the Woods

by Tana French

dell

small valley

Humans are feral and ruthless;

there are always people with whom you never get beyond nods and smiles in corridors, simply because your paths never happen to cross anywhere else.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be.…Now death is un-cool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he told me reproachfully.

Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart’s desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired:

My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind:

But those reports and stuff aren’t just saying things are unhealthy—they’re saying they’re morally wrong. Like you’re somehow a better person, spiritually, if you have the right body-fat percentage and exercise for an hour a day—and there’s that awful condescending set of ads where smoking isn’t just a stupid thing to do, it’s literally the devil. People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it’s all backwards. It’s not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.”

don’t tell pointless lies unless the reality is too much to bear.

The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you crackling to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands.

Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with.

Sometimes I think about the sly, flickering line that separates being spared from being rejected. Sometimes I think of the ancient gods who demanded that their sacrifices be fearless and without blemish,

This, I think, is one of the things I always craved from the job: the way that, at certain moments, you can surrender everything else, lose yourself in the driving techno pulse of it and become nothing but one part of a perfectly calibrated, vital machine.