Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

As critics we may quibble about what is and isn’t beautiful, because we are only human and God’s will isn’t perfectly accessible to us, but we can all agree on the surpassing importance of beauty itself.

For example, God made us the way we are, as complex human beings with desires and impulses, and compassionate attachment to purely fictional people—from whom we obviously can’t expect to derive any material satisfaction or advantage—is a way of understanding the deep complexities of the human condition, and thus the complexities of God’s love for us.

in his life and death, Jesus emphasised the necessity of loving others without regard to our own self-interest.

when we love fictional characters, knowing that they can never love us in return, is that not a method of practising in miniature the kind of personally ...

Oh, just the same girl I’ve been in love with all along, he said. Now and then she likes to toy with my feelings to make sure I’m still interested.

If I’ve ever done anything for you, it was really for myself, because I’ve wanted to be close to you, he went on. And, if I’m honest, I’ve wanted to feel that you needed me, that you couldn’t do without me.

Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives? Time dissolving into thick dark fog, things that happened last week seeming years ago, and things that happened last year feeling like yesterday.

But increasingly I think it’s because, in one way or another, they do believe in God—they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything.

That most of our attempts throughout human history to describe the difference between right and wrong have been feeble and cruel and unjust, but that the difference still remains—beyond ourselves, beyond each specific culture, beyond every individual person who has ever lived or died.

I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It’s not just one thing or another—it doesn’t get fixed into a groove called ‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end.

And I want that—to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care.