Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse – we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.

Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of self permanently.

I also feel certain it’s better to be deeply loved (which you are) than widely liked (which you probably also are! but I won’t labour the point).

Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other.

I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen. But what if that’s not true? What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy? Because I’m scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don’t believe I deserve good things, or some other reason.

Personally I have to exercise a lot of agency in reading, and understanding what I read, and bearing it all in mind for long enough to make sense of the book as I go along. In no sense does it feel like a passive process by which beauty is transmitted to me without my involvement; it feels like an active effort, of which an experience of beauty is the constructed result.

When I look at the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, I don’t ‘want’ anything from it. The pleasure is in seeing it as it is. But when I read books, I do experience desire: I want Isabel Archer to be happy, I want things to work out for Anna and Vronsky, I even want Jesus to be pardoned instead of Barabbas.

but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness.

For all the frustration and difficulty of writing a novel, I knew from the beginning of the process that I had been given something very important, a special gift, a blessing. It was like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before. When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.

And the house around them quiet and solid with its nailed-down floorboards, with its bright burnished tiles in the candlelight. And the gardens dim and silent. The sea breathing peacefully outside, breathing its salt air through the windows. To think of Alice living here. Alone, or not alone. She was standing at the countertop then, serving the crumble out into bowls with a spoon. Everything in one place. All of life knotted into this house for the night, like a necklace knotted at the bottom of a drawer.

Or gradual acceptance of chronic poor health, perhaps presenting new opportunities for spiritual growth?

Of course everything is terrible at the moment, and I miss you ardently, and I miss my family, and I miss parties and book launches and going to the cinema, but all that really means is that I love my life, and I’m excited to have it back again, excited to feel that it’s going to continue, that new things will keep happening, that nothing is over yet.

I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that – to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care.