A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

by Julian Barnes

It’s in all our books, our films; it’s the sunset of a thousand stories.

We lived side by side for many years, fretting at what was wrong with the equation we had invented.

My love does not, cannot make her happy; my love can only release in her the capacity to be happy.

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn’t heart-shaped.

emendations.

Bed is one of the prime places where you can lie without getting caught, where you can holler and grunt in the dark and later boast about your ‘performance’. Sex isn’t acting (however much we admire our own script); sex is about truth. How you cuddle in the dark governs how you see the history of the world. It’s as simple as that.

We get scared by history; we allow ourselves to be bullied by dates.

(And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.)

History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us.

The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections.

We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, though we don’t quite know why we’re here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and writhe in bandaged uncertainty – are we a voluntary patient? – we fabulate.

Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that’s why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn’t be in charge.

So religion and art must yield to love. It gives us our humanity, and also our mysticism. There is more to us than us.

(Whose truth do we prefer, by the way, the victor’s or the victim’s? Are pride and compassion greater distorters than shame and fear?)

Tiggler might be simple, but he wasn’t simple-minded.