A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

by Julian Barnes

Some of the nobler species simply padded away into the forest, declining to survive on the insulting terms offered them by God and Noah, preferring extinction and the waves.

The fact that one animal was capable of killing another did not make the first animal superior to the second; merely more dangerous.

If you had a Fall, so did we. But we were pushed.

Noah, as you will have been told many times, was a very God-fearing man; and given the nature of God, that was probably the safest line to take.

He was a monster, a puffed-up patriarch who spent half his day grovelling to his God and the other half taking it out on us.

Clean and unclean came alike to them on the Ark; lunch first, then piety, that was the rule. And you can’t imagine what richness of wildlife Noah deprived you of. Or rather, you can, because that’s precisely what you do: you imagine it.

He carried the damp and the storm around with him like some guilty memory or the promise of more bad weather.

xestobium rufo-villosum

Deathwatch beetle

And the birds said Noah didn’t know what he was doing – he was all bluster and prayer.

At this point we leave the harbour of facts for the high seas of rumour (that’s how Noah used to talk, by the way).

But this is what, in a manner of speaking, those of us who made the Voyage on the Ark learned to expect from your species. One moment you bark, one moment you mew; one moment you wish to be wild, one moment you wish to be tame. We knew where we were with Noah only in this one respect: that we never knew where we were with him.

But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter. Such naivety can be charming; alas, it can also be perilous.

Blame someone else, that’s always your first instinct. And if you can’t blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn’t a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts.

He fell lightly in love several times each year, a tendency in himself which he would occasionally deplore but regularly indulge.

These Aphrodite Tours brought a predictable clientèle, disparate in nationality but homogeneous in taste. The sort of people who preferred reading to deck quoits, and sun-bathing to the disco.

if … There was always at least one of them, playing the puzzled yet reasonable amateur; unfooled by received opinion, he – or she – knew that historians were full of bluff, and that complicated matters were best understood using zestful intuition untainted by any actual knowledge or research.

In recent years Western governments had been noisy about terrorism, about standing tall and facing down the threat; but the threat never seemed to understand that it was being faced down, and continued much as before. Those in the middle got killed; governments and terrorists survived.

‘The law, Mr Hughes. People are always telling us what is the law. I am often puzzled by what they consider is lawful and what is unlawful.’ He looked away to a map of the Mediterranean on the wall behind Franklin. ‘Is it lawful to drop bombs on refugee camps, for instance? I have often tried to discover the law which says this is permissible. But it is a long argument, and sometimes I think argument is pointless, just as the law is pointless.’

We shall explain to the passengers what is happening. How they are mixed up in history. What that history is.’

‘Irony,’ an ancient TV producer had once confided to him, ‘may be defined as what people miss.’

He talked of early Zionist settlers and Western concepts of land-ownership. The Balfour Declaration. Jewish immigration from Europe. The Second World War. European guilt over the Holocaust being paid for by the Arabs. The Jews having learned from their persecution by the Nazis that the only way to survive was to be like Nazis. Their militarism, expansionism, racism. Their pre-emptive attack on the Egyptian air force at the start of the Six Day War being the exact moral equivalent of Pearl Harbor (Franklin deliberately did not look at the Japanese – or the Americans – at this moment, nor for some time thereafter).

Everything is connected, even the parts we don’t like, especially the parts we don’t like.

It was impossible to form an idea of that first night which was not below the truth.

The voyage of the frigate had begun with a portent, and it ended with an echo.

‘Monsieur Géricault, your shipwreck is certainly no disaster.’

what is true is not necessarily convincing.

But the painting which survives is the one that outlives its own story. Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes (the ignorant eye triumphs – how galling for the informed eye).

history democratizes our sympathies.

Time dissolves the story into form, colour, emotion.

For us the conclusion was inevitable; not for him. We must try to allow for hazard, for lucky discovery, even for bluff. We can only explain it in words, yet we must also try to forget words.

But not with Géricault, the portrayer of madness, corpses and severed heads. He once stopped a friend in the street who was yellow with jaundice and told him how handsome he was looking.

Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.

The beetle was a harbinger. Everyone knew that its sound portended the death of someone in the house within the year.

‘Mere novelty is no proof of value,’

God damn it, he was thinking, this dying business is difficult. They just won’t let you get on with it, not on your own terms, anyway. You have to die on other people’s terms, and that’s a bore, love them as you might.

His daughter replied that there were too many happy accidents in the world for them to be accidental.

‘There always appear to be two explanations of everything. That is why we have been given free will, in order that we may choose the correct one. My father failed to comprehend that his explanations were based as much upon faith as mine. Faith in nothing. It would be all vapour and clouds and rising air to him. But who created the vapour, who created the clouds?

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through the collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.

Immigration, like emigration, is a process in which money is no less important than principles or laws, and often sounder than either of them.

Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness.

Then, having expelled this damp toad, this handful of gutter-muck from her system, she sighs and returns to a purged sleep. I lie awake, clutching a slimy amphibian, shifting a handful of sodden detritus from hand to hand, alarmed and admiring.

Sleep democratizes fear.

You’re right to be sceptical: we should be indulgent only to a certain point with lovers, whose vanities rival those of politicians.

All novelists know their art proceeds by indirection.

‘The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature – or for love, for that matter.’

‘What will survive of us is love.’

‘I love you.’ For a start, we’d better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank.

I love you shouldn’t go out into the world, become a currency, a traded share, make profits for us. It will do that if we let it. But keep this biddable phrase for whispering into a nape from which the absent hair has just been swept.

We must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death.

Trusting virgins drafted into marriage never found Nature had all the answers when they turned out the light. Trusting virgins were told that love was the promised land, an ark on which two might escape the Flood. It may be an ark, but one on which anthropophagy is rife; an ark skippered by some crazy greybeard who beats you round the head with his gopher-wood stave, and might pitch you overboard at any moment.