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‘History isn’t something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn’t politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything. It’s that coffee. You could explain much of the whole history of capitalism and empire and slavery just by talking about coffee. The amount of blood and misery that has taken place for us to sit here and sip coffee out of paper cups is incredible.’
‘History is people. Everyone loves history.’
‘It’s just making them realise that everything they say and do and see is only what they say and do and see because of what has gone before. Because of Shakespeare. Because of every human who ever lived.’
The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here. Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?
You reached the mid-point of your life, and the thoughts got too much. The memories swell. The headaches grow.
almost as if the past is something that could thin the air, or affect the laws of gravity.
But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.
‘Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is. Once it was impossible that this globe we are on wasn’t flat. It is not for science – and certainly not for medicine – to flatter our expectations of Nature. Quite the opposite.’
If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Schopenhauer(German Arthur)
It was depressing that he found it so much easier to question his sanity than my reality.
Anyway, the thing that was depressing me was that humans weren’t turtles.
The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human.
The first technology to lead to fake news wasn’t the internet, it was the printing press. Books solidified the superstition.
Moralistic but a devout lover of pleasure (food, music, the aesthetics of nature). Deeply religious but seemingly as comforted by singing a secular chanson as by prayer. A lover of the natural world who was visibly anxious every time she left the castle. Fragile, but also tough and stubborn.
‘There is not one blade of grass, there is no colour in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice,’
All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.
The secret was never to believe you are good.
I Like The way That when you Tilt Poems On their side They Look like Miniature Cities
But I looked at the New York skyline and felt like the world was dreaming bigger.
I had a feeling of dizziness caused by that rare sense that things were moving fast, not just in my life but in the world. I had been in New York for a few hours now, and the feeling had not waned.
Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.
‘Because, within the structure of the rules, you need to be free.’
That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.
I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body.
Though you can never close the past. The most you can do with it is accept it.
Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.
You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history.
It was a recipe for disaster, but, alas, a familiar one. Empathy was waning, as it often had. Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.
you couldn’t do mathematics with emotions.
but he had something else, something Elizabethans recognised in a way people in the twenty-first century no longer do: an aura. Something strong and metaphysical, a soul sense, a presence, a power.
To thine own self be true.’
All the day the sun that lends me shine By frowns do cause me pine And feeds me with delay; Her smiles, my springs that makes my joys to grow, Her frowns the Winters of my woe.
The human mind has its own. . . prisons. You don’t have a choice over everything in life.’
‘You can’t choose where you are born, you can’t decide who won’t leave you, you can’t choose much. A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does. But there is still room inside it for choice. For decisions.’
Comes as standard. Everything you need to know about right and wrong is already there. It comes as standard. It’s like music. You just have to listen.’
This is the point of being a teacher. A glimmer of hope where you thought it didn’t exist.
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts . . .
‘Ale doesn’t live well,’ he said. ‘A week from today this will taste as sour as a knight’s breeches. Beer lasts for ever. All the hops, they say, causes its immortality. Ale is a more worthy lesson on life. You wait too long, and you will be saying farewell before you say good day.
A Penguin Classic. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald,
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‘The war against boredom. It is a very real war. It is a war in which the enemy is all around us.’
‘The trouble is, if you live long enough, you end up running out of childhoods eventually.’
‘If only we could find a way to stop time,’ said her husband. ‘That’s what we need to work on. You know, for when a moment of happiness floats along. We could swing our net and catch it like a butterfly, and have that moment for ever.’
It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost. The past is not one separate place. It is many, many places, and they are always ready to rise into the present. One minute it is the 1590s, the next it is the 1920s. And it is all related. It is all the accumulation of time. It builds up and builds up and can catch you violently off guard at any moment. The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no
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