Lessons

by Ian McEwan

Roland was thirty-seven. Age and its regrets, its vanished youth and banished expectations—just steps away.

He remained privately fixated on a life he knew he would never have.

After half an hour he thought he had seen every version of the human face, every variation on a limited theme. Eyes, nose, mouth, hair, colour. But still they kept coming, each infinitesimal shift promoting vast difference.

Paragon of humanist virtue! What a deception. Permitted only in fiction.

How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.

You think of your child as your dependant. Then, as he starts to pull away, you discover that you are a dependant too. It had always cut both ways.

Impossible not to stare at the coffin where Rosalind lay in the dark. But she wasn’t there, or anywhere, and here it was again, the simplest feature of death, always startling—absence.

Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.