Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

And Alice, I do feel like a failure, and in a way my life really is nothing, and very few people care what happens in it. It’s so hard to see the point sometimes, when the things in life I think are meaningful turn out to mean nothing, and the people who are supposed to love me don’t.

She looked back at the box of fresh apples, and, as if now feeling it would be inappropriate to continue examining them in any detail, as if the whole process of searching for bruises on the exterior surface of fruit had been rendered ridiculous and even shameful, she picked one up and proceeded to the refrigerator aisle.

Brilliant

I’m going to Rome next week, she said. Because the Italian translation of my book is coming out. I wonder if you’d like to come with me. He showed no surprise at the invitation. He put out his cigarette by rubbing the lit end on the wall of the shed in several repeated strokes. The dog let out one more yelp, down at the end of the garden. I don’t have any money, Felix said. Well, I can pay for everything. I’m rich and famous, remember? This drew a little smile. You are weird, he said. I don’t take that back. How long are you going for? I’m getting there on Wednesday and then coming home again Monday morning. But we can stay longer if you prefer. Now he laughed. Fucking hell, he said. Have you ever been to Rome? No. Then I think you should come, she said. I think you’d like it. How do you know what I would like? They looked at one another. It was too dark for either of them to glean much information from the other’s face, and yet they kept looking, and did not break off, as if the act of looking was more important than what they could see. I don’t, she said. I just think so. Finally he turned away from her. Alright, he said. I’ll come.

I dont know why but i think this is just such good writing

serves to arrange literary discourse entirely around the domineering figure of ‘the author’, whose lifestyle and idiosyncrasies must be picked over in lurid detail for no reason. 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. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me. Confronting this fact makes me feel I am already dead.

And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along. If I have met anyone genuine along the way, then they’ve been so well disguised in the teeming crowd of bloodthirsty egomaniacs that I haven’t recognised them. The only genuine people I think I really know are you and Simon, and by now you can only look at me with pity—not with love or friendship but just pity, like I’m something half-dead lying on the roadside and the kindest thing would be to put me out of my misery.

Fallen completely to her dark inner voice . It's winning

If serious political action is still possible, which I think at this point is an open question, maybe it won’t involve people like us—in fact I think it almost certainly won’t. And frankly if we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven’t deserved this life or even enjoyed it. But I would like to be helpful in some way to the project, whatever it is, and if I could help only in a very small way, I wouldn’t mind, because I would be acting in my own self-interest anyway—because it’s also ourselves we’re brutalising, though in another way, of course. No one wants to live like this. Or at least, I don’t want to live like this. I want to live differently, or if necessary to die so that other people can one day live differently.

Anyway, I have a new theory. Would you like to hear it? Ignore this paragraph if not. 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 know we have good reason to be sceptical of aesthetic nostalgia, but the fact remains that before the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture.

The more I think about sexuality, the more confusing and various it seems to me, and the more paltry our ways of talking about it. The idea of ‘coming to terms’ with your sexuality: this seems to mean, basically, coming to understand whether you like men or women. For me, realising that I liked both men and women was maybe one per cent of the process, maybe not even that much. I know I am bisexual, but I don’t feel attached to it as an identity—I mean I don’t think I have anything special in common with other bisexual people. Almost all the other questions I have about my sexual identity seem more complicated, with no obvious way of finding answers, and maybe even no language in which to articulate the answers if I ever did find them.

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. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child’, and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. 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 suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions. That’s a little like myself and Felix, I think. There is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed.

The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter?

Can it be that during the service I actually came to admire the sincerity of Simon’s faith? But how is it possible for me to admire someone for believing something I don’t believe, and don’t want to believe, and which I think is manifestly incorrect and absurd? If Simon started to worship a turtle as the son of God, for example, would I admire his sincerity? From a strictly rationalist perspective, it makes as much sense to worship a turtle as it does to worship a first-century Judaean preacher. Considering that God doesn’t exist, the whole thing is random anyway, and it may as well be Jesus, or a plastic bucket, or William Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter. And yet I feel I couldn’t admire Simon’s sincerity if he went down the road of turtle worship. Am I just admiring the ritual, then?

Well, I can’t judge you, she said. When I think about the worst things I’ve ever done, I feel the same way you’re describing. Panicky and sick and that kind of thing. I bullied a girl I was in school with, really cruelly. For no reason, other than I suppose to torture her. Because other people were doing it. But then they would say they were doing it because I was. When I remember it now, I mostly just feel scared. I don’t know why I would want to cause another person pain like that. I really want to believe I would never do that kind of thing again, for any reason. But I did do it, once, and I have to live with it for the rest of my life. He watched her intently and said nothing. I can’t make it better, what you did, she said. And you can’t make it better for me either. So maybe we’re both bad people.

Perhaps they didn’t know themselves, and these were questions without fixed answers, and the work of making meaning was still going on.

Meaning making and its tie to unanswered questions

Afterwards, when they parted, Alice seemed to fall asleep instantly, without even moving her arms or legs, which were jumbled awkwardly in the bedclothes. Felix lay down on his side, watching her, and then turned over on his back and stared up at the ceiling.

I think when they parted in this context is so romantic in sucha subtle and tasteful and delicate way

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?

I think it is

seems shocked and uncomfortable that Jesus would allow a sinful woman to touch him in such an intimate way. But Jesus, characteristically puzzling, simply says that all her many sins are forgiven, because she loves him so much. Could it be that easy? 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.

It is

You must really hate me, she said coolly. No, I don’t, he replied. But I don’t love you either. Of course not. Why should you? I wasn’t deluded about that. She turned over then, quite calmly, and switched off the lamp on the bedside locker. The darkness dissolved their faces and only the outlines of their bodies were visible under the sheets. Neither of them moved at all and every line, every shadow in the room was still. You can leave if you’d like, she said. But you’re welcome to stay. You might flatter yourself you’ve hurt me very badly, but I can promise you I’ve been through worse. He lay there in silence, not responding. And when I said I loved you I was telling the truth, she added. He made a noise that sounded like a strangled laugh, and then said: Ah, I like your style. I’ll give you that. You’re not easy to get the upper hand on, are you? Obviously I’m not going to manage it. It’s funny, because you carry on like you’d let me walk all over you, answering my texts at two in the morning, and then telling me you’re in love with me, blah blah blah. But that’s all your way of saying, just try and catch me, because you won’t. And I can see I won’t. You’re not going to let me have it for a minute. Nine times out of ten you’d have someone fooled with the way you go on. They’d be delighted with themselves, thinking they were really the boss of you. Yeah, yeah, but I’m not an idiot. You’re only letting me act badly because it puts you above me, and that’s where you like to...

Wow

If I ever do get a hold of you, you won’t need to tell me, he said. I’ll know. But I’m not going to chase too much. I’ll just stay where I am and see if you come to me. Yes, that’s what hunters do with deer, she said. Before they kill them.

Why is this so fascinating

I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness. Maybe if I had understood that, as I think I do now, at least a little bit, I would never have written those books, I would never have become this person. I don’t know. I know that I couldn’t write them again, or feel the way I felt about myself at that time. It was important to me then to prove that I was a special person.

I was perennially broke, and lonely, and anxious about money, but I also had this other thing, this part of my life which was secret and protected, and my thoughts returned to it all the time, and my feelings orbited around it, and it belonged to me completely. In a way it was like a love affair, or an infatuation, except that it only involved myself and it was all within my own control. (The opposite of a love affair, then.) For all the frustration and difficulty of writing a novel, I knew from the beginning of the process that I had been given something very important, a special gift, a blessing. It was like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before.

Exactly how i feel about my songwriting. Since 23-28

Mary entered, wearing her blue dress, her patent shoes, a feather dangling upright in her hair. Then they all began talking, quickly, remonstrating, laughing, complaining, adjusting each other’s clothing, and the activity in the room was rapid and noisy, like the activity of birds. Lola wanted to repin Eileen’s hair, to make it looser at the back, and Mary wanted to try on at the last minute an alternative pair of shoes, and Eileen, with her slim white arms like reeds, like branches, began to unpin her hair, held a shawl up to Mary’s shoulders, removed a stray eyelash from Lola’s powdered cheekbone, laughing, speaking in a quick light voice and breaking into laughter once again. Mary too was thinking of her childhood, their little terraced house with the shop next door, slivers of ice cream between wafers, chequered oilcloth on the kitchen table, patterned crockery behind glass. Cold bright summer days, air clear as cold water, and the gorse a blaze of yellow. 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. Another knock sounded on the door, and they fell silent and looked around. Their father Pat entered.

Always. What the women share and how they think has been so much more interesting to me. Rooted in human experience as emotion and memory. The secret kknowledge they share. Divine priestess

Only then Eileen saw him, Simon, standing at the church door watching her. They looked at one another for a long moment without moving, without speaking, and in the soil of that look many years were buried.

Such a beautiful way to speak to those deep complex looks that contain lifetimes of thought and experience

To be held in his arms and to feel him move inside her, this man who kept himself apart from everyone, to feel him giving in, taking comfort in her, that was her whole idea of sexuality, it had never surpassed that, still. And for him, to have her in that way, when she was so innocent and nervous, trembling all over, so unconscious it seemed of what she was giving him, he almost felt guilty. But it could never be wrong with her, no matter what they did together, because she had nothing evil in her, and he would give his life away to make her happy. His life, whatever that was.

Ryan.......

Simon, she said. Tenderly, it seemed almost painfully, they smiled at one another, saying nothing, and their questions were the same, am I the one you think about, when we made love were you happy, have I hurt you, do you love me, will you always. From the church gate now, her mother was calling her name. Reaching to touch Simon’s hand Eileen said: I’ll be back. He nodded, he was smiling at her. Don’t worry, he said. I’ll be here.

On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing after a separation of several months. Behind them, a tall fair-haired man alighting from the train carrying two suitcases. The women unspeaking, their eyes closed tight, their arms wrapped around one another, for a second, two seconds, three. Were they aware, in the intensity of their embrace, of something slightly ridiculous about this tableau, something almost comical, as someone nearby sneezed violently into a crumpled tissue; as a dirty discarded plastic bottle scuttled along the platform under a breath of wind; as a mechanised billboard on the station wall rotated from an advertisement for hair products to an advertisement for car insurance; as life in its ordinariness and even ugly vulgarity imposed itself everywhere all around them? Or were they in this moment unaware, or something more than unaware—were they somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world?

And the gardens dim and silent. The sea breathing peacefully outside, breathing its salt air through the windows. To think of Alice living here. Alone, or not alone. She was standing at the countertop then, serving the crumble out into bowls with a spoon. Everything in one place. All of life knotted into this house for the night, like a necklace knotted at the bottom of a drawer.

What i alwaysdream for . Us...family...friends....together . Will they untangle the necklace ?

The sea to the west, a length of dark cloth. And to the east, up through the gates, the old rectory, blue as milk. Inside, four bodies sleeping, waking, sleeping again. On their sides, or lying on their backs, with the quilts kicked down, through dreams they passed in silence. 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.

Felix nodding his head, amused, hands in his pockets. Just girls, is it, he said. Simon looked around at him then. Sorry? he asked. With a serene expression Felix looked back at him. Is it just girls you like, he said. For a moment Simon said nothing, and then in a low easy tone of voice answered: So far. Felix’s high laughter then echoing off the facades of houses.

If you tell me you don’t want to be with me, I might feel very hurt and humiliated, but I’m not going to start begging and pleading with you. At some level, I actually think you know I won’t. But then you get left with the impression that I don’t love you, or I don’t want you, because you’re not getting this response from me—this response that you basically know you won’t get, because I’m not the type of person who can give it to you. I don’t know. I’m not excusing myself, and I’m not excusing Alice. I know you think I’m always defending her, and I suppose when I do that I’m really defending myself, to be honest. Because I see myself in her, and I feel sorry for her. I can see her pushing you away, even though she doesn’t want to, and it hurts her. And I know how that feels.

Brilliant insight into how people feel undereath their behavior .

When Alice reached the bottom of the staircase a few minutes later, Eileen was coming out onto the landing. By the low light of a lamp in the hallway they saw one another and paused, Eileen at the top of the stairs looking down, Alice looking up, their faces anxious, wary, aggrieved, each like a dim mirror of the other, hanging there pale and suspended as the seconds passed.

Beautiful Image and analogy

I just want everything to be like it was, Eileen said. And for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different. Alice was smiling sadly. But if things are different, can we still be friends? she asked. Eileen put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. If you weren’t my friend I wouldn’t know who I was, she said.

eighteen months since that first visit last summer. Eighteen months!! 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.

Precisely How i feel at this exact moment in my life, 18 or s months into or time in Seattle

They really cannot tell the difference between someone they have heard of, and someone they personally know. And they believe that the feelings they have about this person they imagine me to be—intimacy, resentment, hatred, pity—are as real as the feelings they have about their own friends. It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion. Like a malignant growth where the sacred used to be.