Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

The present is a curtain. Most of us can’t see behind it. Those who do see – via luck or prescience – change what is there by seeing. That’s why it’s unknowable. Fundamentally. Intrinsically. I like adverbs.’

Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead-ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won’t rhyme. You can be lost in there for hours. Days, even.

‘In awe of her as I was, I never wanted to be Nina Simone,’ continues Elf. ‘I’m a white English folk singer. She’s a coloured Juilliard-trained genius. She plays blues with her left hand and Bach with her right. I saw her do it.

Reality erases itself as it rerecords itself, Elf thinks. Time is the Great Forgetter. She gets her notebook from her handbag and writes, Memories are unreliable … Art is memory made public. Time wins in the long run. Books turn to dust, negatives decay, records get worn out, civilisations burn. But as long as the art endures, a song or a view or a thought or a feeling someone once thought worth keeping is saved and stays share-able. Others can say, ‘I feel that too.’

True love is the act of trying to love. Effortless love is as dubious as effortless gardening …’

‘My Dutch grandfather used to say, “If you don’t know what to do, do nothing for eight days.”’

‘Once I knew a stable-boy,’ says Francis Bacon. ‘He used to say, “Grief is the bill of love, fallen due.” I can’t recall his face or even name, but I remember that line. Isn’t it odd, what sticks?’

‘For Anglo-Saxons, time is a master. For Mediterraneans, time is a servant.’

We industrialised violence. We mass-produced it, years before Ford. Years before the trenches of Flanders. Gettysburg! Fifty thousand deaths in a single day. The Klan. Lynchings. The Frontier. Hiroshima. The Teamsters. War! We need war like the French need cheese. If there’s no war, we’ll concoct one. Korea. Vietnam. America’s that junkie outside the hotel, only heroin’s not the drug we’re hooked on.

Like Charles Mingus says, writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’