Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

I awoke early, not remembering where I was for the first few moments. Jigsaw pieces of my dream lay dropped around.

Indifference was not enough for her: outrage has become compulsory.

I eavesdropped on businessmen, buying and selling what wasn’t theirs.

Secrets on islands are hidden from mainlanders, but never from the islanders.

The door opened, and I smelled air rainwashed clean. Four high school girls came in, but one of them was completely, completely different. She pulsed, invisibly, like a quasar. I know that sounds stupid, but she did.

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.

He stopped smiling for once and gazed out. “The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, it turns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits the ground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air, this way and that, for the briefest time.… I think that only we Japanese can really understand that, don’t you?”

But I have learned that my Tree tells truths that don’t make sense until the light of morning.

Grudges are demons that gnaw away your bone marrow. Time was already doing a good enough job of that. Lord Buddha has often told me that forgiveness is vital to life. I agree. Not for the well-being of the forgiven, though, but for the well-being of the forgiver.

But access to memories does not guarantee access to truth.

Years arrived, years saddled up and rode away.

The snake grins through his fangs, admiring Eve’s playacting. “God is a nice enough chap in His way. I daresay He means well. But between me, you and the Tree of Knowledge, He is terribly insecure.”

The boys in borrowed suits, trying to look sophisticated. The girls, trying to look at ease. All of them looking awkward.

“Lust is the hard sell. Love is the soft sell. The profit margin is exactly the same.”

Love is a big knot of ‘why’s.”

Jerome can’t bear the sight of his own reflection, he once confessed after drinking a bottle of cheap sherry, and he’s never owned a mirror. I asked him why. He told me that whenever he looks into one he sees a man inside it, and thinks, “Who in God’s name are you?”

After that night, Rudi got himself a gun, and I got myself some bandages.

The Lying-in-Bed Me and the Enjoying-the-Hot-Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them.

Independence and insecurity hobble along together in my three-legged race.

People say they choose, but it comes down to the same thing: why people choose what they choose is also down to chance.

At best, I consider the idea of God to be a childish prank, and at worst a sick joke, probably pulled by the devil, and oh yes you can have one without the other.

Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

Therefore, does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

Too much enthusiasm is much more offputting than not enough.

“The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.”

But people do survive, all around us. The world runs on strangers coping.

The world runs on strangers coping.

Birth deals us out a hand of cards, but as important as their value is the place we are dealt them in.

Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

As chess players or writers or mystics know, the pursuit of insight takes you deep into the forest.

Hello, tiny lifeform of star compost, did you know that your lizardly life, too, is billiarded this way and that by quantum scissors, papers, and stones? That your particles exist in a time-froth of little bridges and holes forever going back and around and under itself? That the universe is the shape of a donut, and that if you had a powerful enough telescope you would see the tip of your tail? Do you care?

“Have you noticed,” said John, “how countries call theirs ‘sovereign nuclear deterrents,’ but call the other countries’ ones ‘weapons of mass destruction’?” “Yes,” I said.

What happens to all the seconds tipped into the bin of the past?

“If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.