Lessons

by Ian McEwan

He could go downstairs now, break his new rule and fill a glass, rummage in the back of a kitchen drawer for a plastic film canister of grass someone left behind six months ago. It might still be there. Roll one up, stand in the garden in the dead of night, step out of ordinary existence to be reminded, as he used to be in his twenties, that he was an insignificant organism on a giant rock rolling eastwards at a thousand miles an hour as it hurtled through the emptiness among the remote indifferent stars. Salute the fact by raising his glass. The pure luck of consciousness.