Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

this, is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! All the various brands of soft drinks in plastic bottles and all the pre-packaged lunch deals and confectionery in sealed bags and store-baked pastries—this is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations. All for this! This convenience shop! I felt dizzy thinking about it. I mean I really felt

People think that socialism is sustained by force—the forcible expropriation of property—but I wish they would just admit that capitalism is also sustained by exactly the same force in the opposite direction, the forcible protection of existing property arrangements.

At the moment I think it’s fair to say we’re living in a period of historical crisis, and this idea seems to be generally accepted by most of the population.

To an extent, I think even some of the more ‘suppressed’ structural symptoms, like the mass drowning of refugees and the repeated weather disasters triggered by climate change, are beginning to be understood as manifestations of a political crisis.

Anyway, as a consequence, each day has now become a new and unique informational unit, interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before.

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.

There is no longer a neutral setting. There is only the timeline.

Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse—we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.

Maybe that’s why middle-aged people always think their thoughts and feelings are more important than those of young people, because they can only weakly remember the feelings of their youth while allowing their present experiences to dominate their life outlook.

Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of self permanently.

I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything.

You got into a long relationship in your twenties that didn’t work out. That doesn’t mean God has marked you out for a life of failure and misery.

The only idea on there seems to be that we should watch the immense human misery unfolding before us and just wait for the most immiserated, most oppressed people to turn around and tell us how to stop it.

She raised an eyebrow. Oh, you are deluded, then, she said. If we’re all just going to die in the end, who’s to say what’s right and what isn’t?

At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape.

But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall.

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

THIS!!!

I also feel certain it’s better to be deeply loved (which you are) than widely liked

After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’ (!), because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about.

Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive—because we are so stupid about each other.

Am I just admiring the ritual, then? Admiring his ability to blandly and uncritically accept received wisdom? Or do I secretly believe there is something special about Jesus, and that to worship him as God, while not quite reasonable, is somehow permissible? I don’t know.

I think if every man who had ever behaved somewhat poorly in a sexual context dropped dead tomorrow, there would be like eleven men left alive. And it’s not only men! It’s women too, and children, everyone. I suppose what I mean is, what if it’s not only a small number of evil people who are out there, waiting for their bad deeds to be exposed? What if it’s all of us?

We just have to weep and prostrate ourselves and God forgives everything? But maybe it’s not easy at all—maybe to weep and prostrate ourselves with genuine sincerity is the hardest thing we could ever learn how to do.

I feel so frightened of being hurt—not of the suffering, which I know I can handle, but the indignity of suffering, the indignity of being open to it.

🤏🏼🤏🏼🤏🏼

If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn’t have made me who I am.

✋🏼

What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?

And I think if I believed in God, I wouldn’t want to prostrate myself before him and ask for forgiveness. I would just want to thank him every day, for everything.

am fascinated and touched by the ‘personality’ of Jesus, in rather a sentimental, arguably even maudlin way.

On the one hand, I feel toward him a kind of personal attraction and closeness that is most reminiscent of my feeling for certain beloved fictional characters—which

On the other hand, I feel humbled and impressed by him in a different way. He seems to me to embody a kind of moral beauty, and my admiration for that beauty even makes me want to say that I ‘love’ him,

I have a strong liking and affection for him and I feel moved when I contemplate his life and death. That’s all.

the example set by Jesus only makes my existence seem trivial and shallow in comparison.

And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good

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.

Because in my deepest essence I am just an artefact of our culture, just a little bubble winking at the brim of our civilisation. And when it’s gone, I’ll be gone. Not that I think I mind.

She hugged her knees to her chest and sobbed with a painful catching sound in her throat.

Jesus Christ Simon I fucking hate you.

Like in your mind we were really just “having fun” all week and you were seeing someone else the whole time? When you were crying all over me the other night telling me how lonely you are, was that your idea of a joke? What the fuck is wrong with you?

Then, holding her thumb to the backspace key, she d...

Simon I’m sorry. I feel awful. I don’t know ...

Then she held the pad of her thumb down once more on the backspace key. Again the reply field was blank, the cursor blinking rhythmically over greyed-out text that read: Type a message.

I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life.

Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals.

I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.

When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it. And now we have to content ourselves with trying not to let down our loved ones, trying not to use too much plastic,

And it seems telling that this meaning of the word ‘beauty’ signifies something so profoundly ugly—plastic counters in expensive department stores, discount pharmacies, artificial perfumes, eyelash extensions, jars of ‘product’.

All its various trends and looks ultimately signify the same principle—the principle of spending.

It makes me feel that rather than worrying and theorising about the state of the world, which helps no one, I should put my energy into living and being happy.

But when I read books, I do experience desire: I want Isabel Archer to be happy, I want things to work out for Anna and Vronsky, I even want Jesus to be pardoned instead of Barabbas.

Humankind strives to possess and understand these properties as a way of turning toward God and understanding his nature; therefore whatever is beautiful leads us toward contemplation of the divine.