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‘It’s so easy to forgive other people’s parents.’
His pleasure in being naked, Heinrich said later, was proof of his German heritage.
The centre of the modern home was no longer the sitting room, the parlour or the study of the paterfamilias. It was the kitchen, and the heart of the kitchen was its table. This was where children learned basic manners, including the unspoken rules of conversation, and how to be in company and where they would absorb for a lifetime the vital rhythm and rituals of regular meals and begin to take for granted their first simple duties in helping to clear away. It was where the post was opened, where friends sat around talking and drinking, while their host prepared their supper. And it was where,
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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.
By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?
Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.
One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out.
