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‘I regret that I teach piano more than I play it.
One regret shifted from practically invisible to bold and back again, as if it was flashing on and off, right there as she looked at it. The regret was ‘I regret not yet having children.’ ‘That is a regret that sometimes is and sometimes isn’t,’ explained Mrs Elm,
Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she was just scared of living. But Bertrand Russell had more marriages and affairs than hot dinners, so perhaps he was no one to give advice.
This was a life where she put four exclamation marks in a row. That was probably what happier, less uptight people did.
A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.
‘Are you happy, Dan?’ ‘No one’s happy, Nora.’
Maybe even suicide would have been too active. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.
‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’
‘Don’t be daft. You’d have always done something big.’
For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live – the happily-married one, the successful-poet one – was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs and so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.
The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.
When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.
But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.
This life was an intense one, without compromise. It was currently minus seventeen degrees, and she had nearly been eaten by a polar bear, and yet maybe the problem with her root life had partly been its blandness. She had come to imagine mediocrity and disappointment were her destiny.
Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself. Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place. She had no idea about any of it, really.
To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
But the sex turned out to be a disappointment. A Camus quote came to her, right in the middle of it. I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
‘I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,’ she said, realising something for the first time. ‘But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths. In one life, I might be married. In another, I might be working in a shop. I might have said yes to this cute guy who asked me out for a coffee.
Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.’
It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for
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It seems impossible to live without hurting people.’ ‘That’s because it is.’ ‘So why live at all?’ ‘Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too.
‘You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess,’ she said, as if Nora had nothing bigger to think about. ‘And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game. And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a
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‘Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’
‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’
She peeled off the lid to find a cheese and Marmite sandwich and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.
It was one of life’s rules – Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff – and Dan had failed at that one, and many of the others.
She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.
‘We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’
‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’ It wasn’t raining any more.
It was safe to surmise the little-known realities of the multiverse probably weren’t yet incorporated within the care plans of the National Health Service.
It was nothing but trees and traffic and mediocre architecture, but it was also everything. It was life.
