Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

But it also strikes me that the idea of ‘conservatism’ is in itself false, because nothing can be conserved, as such – time moves in one direction only, I mean.

We can’t conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way. Just look at what conservatives make of the environment: their idea of conservation is to extract, pillage and destroy, ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’ – but because of that very fact, it’s no longer the same earth we do it to.

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.

the colossal speed and waste and godlessness of the twentieth century,

I also feel certain it’s better to be deeply loved (which you are) than widely liked (which you probably also are! but I won’t labour the point).

I suppose I was seeing but not looking – the visual world just came to me flat, like a catalogue of information. I never looked at things anymore, in the way I had before.

The streets were quiet and dark, and the air was oddly warm and still, and on the quays the office buildings were all lit up inside, and empty, and underneath everything, beneath the surface of everything, I began to feel it all over again – the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything.

In one of the paintings she’s handsome, dark, statuesque in a white dress; she sits on a balcony alongside two other figures, her forearm relaxed against the parapet, her hand holding a closed fan; she’s looking away, almost frowning, her face is complex and expressive, she’s deep in thought.

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?