Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

But they wouldn’t be paying me to do something I liked, would they? That’s the thing about work, if it was any good you’d do it for free.

It was as if I suddenly remembered that my life was all part of a television show—and every day people died making the show, were ground to death in the most horrific ways, children, women, and all so that I could choose from various lunch options, each packaged in multiple layers of single-use plastic. That was what they died for—that was the great experiment. I thought I would throw up. Of course, a feeling like that can’t last. Maybe for the rest of the day I feel bad, even for the rest of the week—so what? I still have to buy lunch. And in case you’re worrying about me, let me assure you, buy lunch I did.

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. I know you know this.

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.

My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence. You can actually see the change in process if you look at street photography from before and after 1976.

I’m not going to get into another argument with you about the Soviet Union, but when it died so did history. I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.

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.

I asked Simon the other night whether he prays to God, and he told me yes—‘to say thank you’. 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.

The problem with museums like the d’Orsay, by the way and just totally incidentally, is that there’s far too much art, so that no matter how well you plan your route or how noble your intentions, you will always find yourself walking irritably past priceless works of profound genius looking for the bathrooms. And you feel slightly cheapened afterwards, like you’ve let yourself down—at least I do.

People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life.

I guess you could say the old ways of being together were wrong—they were!—and that we didn’t want to repeat old mistakes—we didn’t. But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing.

This whole section is worth rereading

The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition.

I know that if I really had any talent I would have done something with my life by now—I don’t delude myself about that. If I tried I’m sure I would fail and that’s why I’ve never tried.

Personally I have to exercise a lot of agency in reading, and understanding what I read, and bearing it all in mind for long enough to make sense of the book as I go along. In no sense does it feel like a passive process by which beauty is transmitted to me without my involvement; it feels like an active effort, of which an experience of beauty is the constructed result. But, I think more importantly, great novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things. When I look at the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, I don’t ‘want’ anything from it. The pleasure is in seeing it as it is. 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.

For you and me it’s harder, because we can’t seem to shake the conviction that nothing matters, life is random, our sincerest feelings are reducible to chemical reactions, and no objective moral law structures the universe. It’s possible to live with those convictions, of course, but not really possible, I don’t think, to believe the things that you and I say we believe. That some experiences of beauty are serious and others trivial. Or that some things are right and others wrong. To what standard are we appealing? Before what judge do we argue our case?

I can’t believe that the difference between right and wrong is simply a matter of taste or preference; but I also can’t bring myself to believe in absolute morality, which is to say, in God.

To think of childhood gave her a funny queasy feeling, because it had been real life once and now it was something else. The old people had died, the babies had grown old. It would happen also to Eileen, also to Lola, who were young and beautiful now, loving and hating one another, laughing with white teeth, smelling of perfume.

But I’m sorry to say that I think it is too late to change the way we have turned out. The turning-out process has come to an end, and we are to a very great extent what we are. Our parents are getting older, and Lola is married, and I will probably continue to make poor life decisions and suffer recurrent depressive episodes, and Simon will probably continue to be a highly competent and good-natured but emotionally inaccessible person. But maybe it was always going to be that way, and there was never anything we could have done.

And already now behind the house the sun was rising. On the back walls of the house and through the branches of the trees, through the coloured leaves of the trees and through the damp green grasses, the light of dawn was sifting. Summer morning. Cold clear water cupped in the palm of a hand.

I had just got used to the idea that nothing would ever happen between us again, he said. Not that it was easy. But it was easier than wondering, in a way.

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.

Eighty to ninety per cent of my days are the same as they would be anyway—working from home, reading, avoiding social gatherings. But then it turns out that even a tiny amount of socialising is very different from none—I mean, one dinner party every two weeks is categorically different from no parties at all.

But maybe he’s right—maybe I’m not so bad, maybe even a good person, and we’ll have a happy family together. Some people do, don’t they? Have happy families, I mean. I know you didn’t, and I didn’t. But Alice, I’m still so glad we were born.