Why does she always respond to happy news with a severe bout of hayfever? And is it really only death that can make love real? ‘There but for the grace of God’ is an insult to the unlucky.
He is never without a sense of inhabiting the solar system in three dimensions, and does not consider even his local area as a two-dimensional entity. From his window, when sick, he watches a divided family in their various lighted rooms.
All the unsettling little gaps in his knowledge – the words of whose precise meaning he is unsure, the places he couldn’t quite pinpoint on a map – are not, after all, gradually filled in by accumulating life experience, but remain as a fixed measure of his mind’s capacity for culture and knowledge.
The quickening trance of negotiating immediate peril, leaping from rock to rock. The need to face physical danger. How trivial regrets and embarrassing moments rankle. What of profound errors?
Feeling like a knotted rag – passions tangled and tired, stubbornly lingering but misdirected and corrupt. Rembrandt’s self portrait as an exemplar of the power of art to give people a glimpse of their own doom.
“In private thoughts, Mike and James describe themselves in terms such as ‘fraud’, ‘failure’ and ‘waster’, and mope about accumulating future regrets. Yet when their correspondence begins, they find themselves insulting each other while passionately defending their own choices. It takes a series of outside shocks – an illness, a chance reunion, a vengeful act of biblioclasty – to reconcile these internal conflicts.”
Thomas Maloney, The Creed of Compromise
River Kennet, Reading
Merryman's Bay
Brenda's mountain
Dan's office
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