Lucía’s Reviews > The Sense of an Ending > Status Update

I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

When you're young —when I was young— you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we had told abour our life. Told to others, but —mainly— to ourselves.

But time... how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time... give us time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Odd how the image of someone's posture always remains with you.

It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be remainded of instability beneath our feet.

We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, (...) the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

Though why should we expect life to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpouse could nostalgia serve?

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.