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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. Now a majority of objects in our visual environment are made of plastic, the ugliest substance on earth, a material which when dyed does not take on colour but actually exudes colour, in an inimitably ugly way.
Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things—I mean just the things that were in front of me. People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them.
I feel toward him a kind of personal attraction and closeness that is most reminiscent of my feeling for certain beloved fictional characters—which makes sense, considering that I’ve encountered him through exactly the same means, i.e. by reading about him in books.
But that’s as close as I get to thinking about his divinity. I have a strong liking and affection for him and I feel moved when I contemplate his life and death. That’s all.
All my mania for culture, for ‘really good’ things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, what if it’s all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins?
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.
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.
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.
nobody goes around committing mass murders just because they don’t believe in God. 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. Goodness regardless of reward, regardless of our own desires, regardless of whether anyone is watching or anyone will know.
When he asked me, I found it was easy to answer, I didn’t have to think about it. I told him I wanted to have the baby. He cried then and said he was very happy. And I believed him, because I was very happy too.
We have to try either way to build a world they can live in. And I feel in a strange sense that I want to be on the children’s side, and on the side of their mothers; to be with them, not just an observer, admiring them from a distance, speculating about their best interests, but one of them.
it would be a sort of sick, insane thing to do, a way of mutilating my real life as a gesture of submission to an imagined future.
Sometimes I think he’s so perfectly suited to being a parent, so relaxed and dependable and good-humoured, that no matter how awful I am, the child will turn out fine anyway.
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. But I really used to believe that it did.
