Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

We can’t conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way.

‘Who is now alone, will long remain so, / will wake, read, write long letters / and wander restlessly here and there / along the avenues, as the leaves are drifting.’

What does Saint Augustine say? Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.

The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.

Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of self permanently. Like the way I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty and it was so painful and awkward and bad, and since then I’ve always felt like exactly the kind of person that would happen to, even though before then I didn’t.

I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong.

So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for? Love always, Alice.

And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one. However: Jesus teaches us not to judge. I can’t approve of unforgiving puritanism or of moral vanity, but I am hardly perfect in either regard.