Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

But broken hearts aren’t clever or logical.

The UFO Club vibrates as Pink Floyd sets the ship’s controls for the heart of the pulsing sun.

Jasper asks, “Do you think reality is just a mirror for something else?” Mecca’s answer lags behind her waxy boyish lips: “Ja, bestimmt. This is why a photograph of something is more true than the thing.”

“Why ‘digs’? Like, with a spade? Why?” “I’ve no idea. I didn’t design English.”

To have your photo taken is to be told, ‘You exist.’

“How music works—the theory, the practice—is learnable.” Jasper prizes the lid off the coffee. “Why it works, God only knows. Maybe not even God.”

‘Utopia’ means ‘no place.’ An avenue is a place. So is music. When we’re playing well, I’m here, but elsewhere, too. That’s the paradox. Utopia is unattainable. Avenues are everywhere.”

“It’s like a lake giving up its dead.”

Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won’t rhyme.

He kisses the side of Mecca’s head, hoping his kiss passes through her skull and lodges in a crevice in her brain.

He feels what you feel when you’ve lost something, but before you’ve worked out what it is.

“Don’t yer ever get pissed off?” “I’ve tried, but I’m unconvincing.”

“Yer should always look a gift horse in its mouth. They’re never gifts.”

Heckling Nina Simone would be like heckling a mountain.

are a star first, therefore you have the hits.”

I asked if I could ever learn to play like that. ‘No,’ he told me, ‘because’—I’ll always remember this—‘you haven’t lived my life and the blues is a language you can’t lie in.’ But if I wanted it enough, he said, then one day I’d learn to play like me.

Reality erases itself as it rerecords itself,

Suffering is the promise that life always keeps.

True love is the act of trying to love. Effortless love is as dubious as effortless gardening…”

Time is what stops everything happening at once.

Dean never saw the point of church. “God works in mysterious ways” seemed no different from “Heads I win, tails you lose.”

“Acting like yer the King of Showbiz when yer’ve got fuck-all on yer CV’ll make yer look a twat. Twat.”

The river slid by. The river slid by. The river slid by.

“The mystery o’ fishing’s this,” said Dean’s dad, “what’s the hook, who’s got the rod, what’s the maggot, what’s the fish?”

Günther wrinkled his nose. “It is too nihilist.” Dean didn’t know the word. “It’s just nihilist enough.”

“The best pop songs are art,” says Jasper. “Making art is already a political act. The artist rejects the dominant version of the world. The artist proposes a new version. A subversion. It’s there in the etymology. Tyrants are right to fear art.”

“My Dutch grandfather used to say, ‘If you don’t know what to do, do nothing for eight days.’ ” Dean asked, “Why eight?” “Less than eight is haste. More than eight is procrastination. Eight days is long enough for the world to shuffle the deck and deal you another hand.”

“Once I knew a stable-boy,” says Francis Bacon. “He used to say, ‘Grief is the bill of love, fallen due.’ I can’t recall his face or even name, but I remember that line. Isn’t it odd, what sticks?”

“A proper night out is both bomb making and bomb disposal.

“My wife’s in Maastricht, visiting her family.”

“Us old shrinks never retire. We just vanish in a puff of theory.”

I slept like a fugitive, if I slept at all.

Someone needs to invent a verb tense that you only use for the…for people who have…gone.”

“A brain constructs a model of reality. If that model isn’t too different from most people’s model, you’re labeled sane. If the model is different, you’re labeled a genius, a misfit, a visionary, or a nutcase. In extreme cases, you’re labeled a schizophrenic and locked up. I’d be dead without Rijksdorp sanatorium.”

He remembers realizing this before. He remembers realizing he remembered realizing this before.

as rare as rocking-horse shit.”

“Good for you. The word ‘faster’ is becoming a synonym of ‘better.’ As if the goal of human evolution is to be a sentient bullet.”

“You have a way with dogs.” I told it to go away. In Mongolian. “Why would a Dutch dog understand Mongolian?” Don’t underestimate dogs.

“It’s a risk. The ethics of what we do are gray, I admit. But if ethics aren’t gray they aren’t really ethics.”

maybe freedom’s the road to freedom.”

“Sure. But reality creeps in wherever you live, however pretty the flowers are, however blue the sky, however great the parties. The only people who actually live in dreams are people in comas.”

You helped make him, but he’ll make a man of you.”