Status Updates From Waterland

This is brilliant.

😥

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in.

I know what you feel. Yes, the end of the world’s on the cards again – maybe this time it’s for real. But the feeling’s not new. Saxon hermits felt it. They felt it when they built the pyramids to try to prove it wasn’t true. My father felt it in the mud at Ypres. My grandfather felt it and drowned it with suicidal beer. Mary felt it … It’s the old, old feeling, that everything might amount to nothing.

Does Helen Atkinson, too, then, believe in miracles? No, but she believes in stories. She believes that they’re a way of bearing what won’t go away, a way of making sense of madness ... And out of this discovery she evolves a precept: No, don’t forget. Don’t erase it. You can’t erase it. But make it into a story. Just a story.

He escapes to his story-books. Because he can still do that. Jump from the one realm to the other, as if they shut each other out. He hasn’t begun yet to put the two together. To live an amphibious life. He hasn’t begun to ask yet where the stories end and reality begins. But he will, he will.

And what does this question Why imply? It implies ... dissatisfaction, disquiet, a sense that all is not well. In a state of perfect contentment there would be no need or room for this irritant little word. History begins only at the point where things go wrong; history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret. So that hard on the heels of the word Why comes the sly and wistful word If.

That’s the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson.