Lessons

by Ian McEwan

First we feel. Then we fall. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

She wrapped her perfume around him.

had a sergeant who used to say that where there’s people there’s a crime scene.”

Seamus Heaney once said that a writer’s duty was to turn up at the desk.

The country stood together, united in anxiety.

For six years the Baines family made a life in an obscure crevice of history.

“Nothing is so dishonourable in a civilised nation as to permit itself to be ‘governed’ without resistance by a reckless clique that has surrendered to depraved instinct.”

What must it be, to burst out of deep infant sleep into the shocking singular fact of existence.

man-made events were running out of control. The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear.

Nothing forces public events on private lives like a war.

“Try not to fight with her tonight. It doesn’t matter what she thinks. You’ll make your own decisions anyway.”

She took his hand. “It’s so easy to forgive other people’s parents.”

If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.

They looked ahead to their not-so-distant fiftieth birthdays and knew they were discussing their own future decline. Some were already contemplating knee and cataract operations or forgetting a familiar name. There were good selfish reasons to be kindly to the old. That

this form of parental dismay. You think of your child as your dependant. Then, as he starts to pull away, you discover that you are a dependant too. It had always cut both ways.

her true interest was Alissa’s perfidy.

“You weren’t there. You met Oma and Opa years later when they’d softened, the way people do.

Rosalind’s vascular dementia did not run a straight course to its terminal point. Her body would not give up and it dragged her mind back into the

But in surveying a life it was inadvisable to acknowledge too much defeat.

The January assault on the Capitol could be merely a trough, a singular moment of shame to be discussed in wonder for years.

Or a portal to a new kind of America, the present administration just an interregnum, a variant of Weimar.

The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense.